Facing the Bullets
by Desdemona Kakalose
Summary: In the midst of the tension that's been rising since Christmas, the boys kick up a hotbed of political, and possibly supernatural, upheaval like a bunch of kids screwing with an ant bed. And of course, ants bite. Post-apocalyptic Conworth.
1. Chapter 1

_Facing the Bullets_

For a story that was already outlined over a year ago, this sure has taken a long time to write. May be up to three chapters long. Do not consume after midnight. Side effects may include dizziness, feels, irritation with fictional characters, and irritation with authors who take two months to put out the first chapter of a story they promised ages ago.

* * *

I would drive on to the end with you,  
a liquor store or two keeps the gas tanks full

-"Demolition Lovers"

_Nearly Three Years After_

_Arizona_

Worth moves before he has time to think. Synapses fire, but they're firing for his legs and arms and not his common sense.

He's been here before.

He knows this feeling.

His legs and arms have all the synapses to themselves, and they, at least, know they're going to die. It's a downright pity his survival instincts were always such utter shit.

The bullets are beams of light, slicing through his skin, leaving a dozen glowing holes in his body that look like burning glitter with the light behind them.

He turns, because there's something there, something behind him and it's more important than anything—more important than air, than the blood he ought to be losing—and he has to know if…

He wakes up.

-A-

All the Midwest states blur together at the seams. Not even Conrad could keep them straight all the time; they're huge and one end looks completely different from the other end and half of their names Worth doesn't even remember learning.

Right now he was placing his bets on Nevada, because Nevada seemed like a fairly appropriate state to place a bet with.

The heater spewed vaguely chemical smelling waves of not-quite-hot-enough across the passenger seat, and the glass on the window was cold where it pressed against Doc Worth's temple.

"You okay?" Conrad asked, a shadow settled into the driver's seat. "You're breathing kind of hard."

Heart beating like a raver's speakers, lungs pumping hard enough to pressurize an airplane, jittering fingers on the one hand that isn't crushed against his side? What was the problem, there was no problem.

Worth glared at him blearily. "Maybe my carcass is finally givin' out, on account a you hoggin' all the hot air?"

"Hey," Conrad snapped, "fuck you, I have a right to these vents. I get two, you get two, learn to live with it."

"Shit, two whole vents? Careful, ice queen, yer gonna melt yerself at this rate."

"I'll show _you_ ice queen."

"Oh sugar, ya make it sound like I ain't already seen that plenty."

"Right, yes, let's do _this _song and dance routine again, that's exactly what I want to do with my night."

"A routine, just fer me? Well now, lookit that, now I feel like a real classy date, y'sure know how ter treat a fella."

"You know, you're saying some words but all I'm hearing here is _bluhbluh passive aggressive douchery._"

"Sweetcheeks, any'a yer old headshrinks ever told ya 'bout a little thing called _projection_?"

"Don't get smart with me, it isn't cute and it doesn't suit you."

"Aw, but how else am I goin' ter show off my fourth grade edumication?"

A frizzled red head popped into the space between their seats, and like a hot needle jabbing through a big rosy boil, all the tension that had been quietly bubbling up around the cockpit started to leak away in a sickly slow trickle.

"Whoa hey," Hanna said, a slightly strained grin pulled across his teeth, "do I need to get Horatio up here for some hardcore marital counseling?"

"Screw you, Hanna," Conrad muttered, white hands flexing on the wheel. "Mind your own business."

"Okay, okay," the magician replied, palms up in the universal gesture for _keep your panties on_, "it's just that lately you guys've been goin' at it a lot harder than usual, and I'm gonna be frank with you, it's starting to make me and Horatio uncomfortable. I mean, more uncomfortable than usual which is a sort of baseline uncomfortable we're all learning to acclimate to."

"Horatio and I," Conrad hissed, staring straight ahead.

"Uh, what?"

"Horatio and I, not me and Horatio, Hanna, grammar is one of the basic laws of humanity separating us from the ranks of lower primates and my esteemed parasite here, and it would be great if you'd learn to use it."

"Wow." Hanna looked back and forth between the vampire and Worth, who was tapping a cigarette against the dashboard and had been for the last minute. "See, now I know you're not okay, because you never do this _heil Grammar _routine when you're feeling okay."

Conrad said nothing.

"Seriously, Con-man, you can tell me. What's up?"

And Worth had sunken into one of those transparent moments when he forgot that he was actually a player in this scene, so that when Conrad finally looked up, fixed one blazing red eye on him and Hanna followed his gaze, Worth felt a little like he'd been punched.

"Well," the doctor ground out, pushing up out of the abused cushion, "looks like I ain't needed here. Try not ter have too much fun while I'm gone, eh?"

When he slouched out of the room, he was fairly certain that he felt eyes on his back all the way to the door of the bedroom.

Thank god Hanna hadn't made him stick around. That was all he needed, a feelings jam on top of an already shitty night.

-A-

According to the zombie, the town they were headed for was objectively a curiosity. Objectively a massive cocksucking pain in the ass, more like; but when Worth had said as much, Horatio had patiently pointed out that he was confusing _objective_ for _subjective_ and goddamn but it was impossible to get into a proper argument with the walking slim jim.

Worth had kept the rest of his opinions to himself for the afternoon.

What made the town a curiosity was mostly that it had continued to be a town in stubborn opposition to the sweet pillow talk of common sense. Miles into the desert, in the flat basin between far away mountains, it sat like a little sun bleached tick on the Arizona dirt (it was Arizona after all, but only just barely). A full day's drive from the nearest holding pond, somehow their tiny little world had kept on spinning long after the sprinklers lost water pressure and the sunbeam bread trucks stalled out halfway through the desert. They were in a minority. For all that Worth had seen of various deserts in the course of three years, they _were_ the minority.

Roswell shifted at the back of his mind, a town full of sand and skeletons.

Of course, they hadn't had much reason to go snooping around in deserts before Roswell, and somehow they'd managed to completely avoid them afterwards. It wouldn't be too much of a stretch to say that more towns like Mesquite were out there in the world, struggling blindly on. Worth certainly wasn't about to go looking for them.

…Unless Hanna decided that was their next job, god help them all.

Somewhere in the latest hours of the night—Worth could almost feel the pink fingers of dawn slipping over the horizon—long after Worth had settled back into a restless sort of sleep, the queen-sized square of Worth's current universe squeaked and bent under a new weight. Cool hands shoved him over into a smaller territory of mattress, yanked blankets out of his weakly fisted hands.

Looked like the princess wasn't mad enough to sleep on the floor, at least.

Worth slipped into a somewhat less restless sleep, and the morning glimmered away somewhere far above them.

-A-

They were on the lookout, but even if they hadn't been, enough time on abandoned country roads had trained them to recognize the signs.

In the last half-lit hours of the new evening, Worth spotted a fresh track of dust on the asphalt. Half an hour later, the RV pulled up into a desiccated parking lot on what appeared to be the edge of somebody's former down-town.

The four of them unloaded messily, Conrad squinting slightly as his vision adjusted snap-fast to the darkness, Hanna jamming new batteries into a flashlight with so much enthusiasm he nearly lost his hold on the damn thing.

The zombie turned his headlight gaze on the sterile-looking police department across the street. "Hanna," he started, a cautionary rumble in the quiet, "don't you think we ought to wait till morning? In the dark, we may find it even more difficult to pass ourselves off as potential merchants than we usually do."

Hanna screwed up his face in concentration, peering down the business end of his flashlight. "Nah, I wouldn't worry about, Lear. No wait. Bad name choice, not that one. Sounds too much like _Leeeeer_ and I don't wanna make anybody uncomfortable—_shit fuck damn!_"

The light bulbs in the flashlight had suddenly remembered how to function.

Long suffering, Conrad sighed and plucked the flashlight out of Hanna's hands, leaving him free to rub wildly at his starry eyes.

"Look," the vampire said, brows scrunching downward, "it's not that I don't trust your social tact after years of watching you introduce us at every rat hole village on the continent, but I frankly do not trust your social tact. Let's get back in the camper and wait till morning, when we won't look as much like vagrant hoodlums."

Blinking blearily, Hanna answered, "Man, no, you just don't wanna introduce yourself to strangers anymore. You gotta get back out there in the world, meet some people! Like the rest of us, we make friends all over the place! Well, me and Patroclus do, Worth mostly just makes enemies but that's kind of like making friends right? Long lasting emotional bonds, deep personal connections, et cetera? Come on, it'll be good for you!"

Conrad looked just a hair shy of horrified.

"Yeah Connie," Worth pitched in for the hell of it, "y'gotta forge some _deep pers'nal connections,_ meetcherself a handsome prince, settle down, have some rugrats. Y'know. Be a proper lady."

"It's people like you who set the feminist movement back a century," Conrad sniped back.

"Come on guys," Hanna shouted, already halfway down the block by the time they turned around to look. "Meaningful human contact waits!"

The artists sighed, shouldered his bag of soaps, and followed wearily after; his footfalls were silent on the concrete. Worth and the dead man got their less-spry bones moving a few seconds after. When the two of them had fallen far enough behind that the figures ahead were mostly silhouettes against ovals of white light on the sidewalk, the zombie shifted a fraction of an inch closer.

"It's probably not going to end well," Frankenstein confided, graceful movements shoulder to shoulder with the doctor's careless slouch. "Hanna worries about Conrad. He worries that Conrad has no one to talk to."

Worth frowned. "He's got us, don't he?"

The dead man turned his head slightly and raised one mute eyebrow. Well, fuck, you always forgot that he could make facial expressions when he took a notion to.

The awkward sideways staring contest finally broke when Doc Worth slammed his foot into some abandoned bloody hubcap in the middle of the sidewalk and went spinning, clutching at the foot in question and swearing hard enough to resurrect the royal fucking navy. Teach _him_ to try and outstare the eye of Sauron, wouldn't it.

He heard whatshisface sighing heavily somewhere in the background, but he could damn well get over himself, they both knew that he could barely remember _how_ to breathe. That sighing shit wasn't fooling anybody.

"Fuck," Worth grunted, when the worst of it had passed.

The dead guy just _looked _at him.

And then the sirens went off.

As sirens went, they were pretty lack luster. Somebody's old megaphone turned to its most obnoxious setting, followed pretty quickly by some squalking and a _car alarm_ of all things. Worth realized belatedly that he hadn't really heard the _full,_ horrific scope of a car alarm's capability until now, in this brave and more importantly _silent_ new world, when the loudest ambient noise in a thousand mile radius was probably somebody's shrieking toddler.

In a matter of minutes, there was a whole street teaming with slapdash militia. By that point, Worth and the Zombie had caught up with their better halves and were exchanging a full rainbow of expressions ranging from resigned disapproval to seething murderous rage. Hanna was actually _whistling,_ the little bastard.

Finally, somebody shut off the goddamn car alarm.

There was silence in the road, while either side regarded each other. God knew what conclusions the raggedy fuckers were drawing right now, but Worth was drawing plenty enough of his own. There were a lot of them—mostly men, almost all men, and even if more men had survived the grand old reckoning in general, you still had to account that for maybe seventy percent of the population at most—and they were a ratty bunch of guys dressed in boxers and crocs, shouldering shotguns that had that particular look of probably all belonging to the same old bastard's collection before things changed. Sometimes you could just look at a collection and tell.

"Hi!" Hanna called out, taking it upon himself to open negotiations. Yet again. "Nice town you got here! A little W_indswept_ but hey that's cool too, I mean, this is a desert what else would it be?"

The mass of local boys shifted suspiciously, attempting to peer through their own ranks subtly with varying levels of success. Looking for a leader. Worth knew mobs, and he knew that probably the only thing keeping a damper on this powder keg was a shortage of bullets. How many of those guns were actually loaded? Impossible to say, but definitely not the whole batch.

They needed to single somebody out, and quick.

Hanna must have been thinking the same thing, because he flashed a face-splitter of a smile at one of the few women and said, "Does anyone around here run an inn? It's been a long night and I know I'm game for a real bed. We can pay for it, as long as you don't mind barter! I mean, who takes cash any more, right?"

The crowd shifted uneasily, and the woman glanced meaningfully at the guy to her right a couple times before she finally came out with anything.

"Ray-Anne Jenkins' place has three spare bedrooms. If she'll take you. What's on the table? We're not letting strangers into our houses for some shoelaces."

Hanna's shoulders relaxed, and he took a little half-step forward. He was in his element now.

"We've got a little bit of food," he started off, ticking off fingers as he went, "and we do actually have shoelaces. Aspirin, bicycle chains, some fabric, dog food—a little worse for the wear, I'll level with ya—plaster mix, bug spray, netting, and I think we picked up some chicken wire in Utah, didn't we, Patroclus? Yeah, so, there's that. Also, the shady looking guy here is actually a doctor, and I'm a magician."

Somebody elbowed the woman, and she flashed them a glare before tugging the terrycloth front of her robe back into order. She looked cold as goddamn balls, Worth would give her that. "What, like a stage magician? We're not exactly putting on a birthday party here."

"No no no," Hanna said, waving her off. "Like a wizard. Um. Specifically, a rune-mage. If you've got any sick livestock or lost children I could—why are you looking at me like that? It's… really weird in stereo."

What you usually got in places like these were doubtful looks, or outright laughter. Plenty of places were still out of the loop, where ambassadors hadn't been interested in visiting and out of town traffic was minimum. Isolated farmtowns, survivor enclaves in heavy dying areas… desert cities…

What you didn't usually get was a wave of swearing and tripping backwards over the people in the back row.

"No seriously," Hanna pushed, uneasy, "what's the hubbub for?"

"Where are you from?" their lady asked sharply, eyes narrow.

"Wuh, uh, California originally but we—"

"How long have you been in the area?"

"Well we just drove over the county line about an hour ago—"

"Do you know the Rowleys? The Spaceys? Have you talked to a man named Ishmael?"

"No, we really haven't—"

"Does _peezaknalost _mean anything to you?"

"No, it… wait." Hanna paused, pressed his palms against his eyes, started mouthing unintelligible strings of sounds under his breath. Eventually he seemed to settle on an answer, and when he dropped his hands his eyes were bright and curious.

"You mean, prizrak _znalost?_" he asked. Slow nods chorused across the pavement; Hanna's eyes burned brighter. "Yeah, then I know a little bit! It's theoretical knowledge though, I never wanted to mess around with summoning if I didn't have to, and it's hard to get names without some serious connections. Um. Why is Prizrak Znalost something you guys are worried about?"

The woman exchanged a look with her nearest neighbor.

"Why don't you come with us. I think there's probably a few open rooms in the Captain's house."

The Captain's house was not a jail.

Worth forked over a handful of pennies to Hanna as their Welcoming Mob directed them towards what looked like a very expensive house masquerading as a very cheap saloon. The woman ahead of them explained that the Captain's widow had been looking for someone to rent the top floor to a few years ago, and after "you know", it had stayed empty.

The widow and her daughter lived on the bottom floor.

"Thought fer sure it was gonna be a jail," Worth remarked, as the woman mashed the doorbell.

"I have to admit," Conrad murmured, "I was expecting that too. I mean, two women living alone in the middle of town?"

Their de facto tour guide glanced back at them. "Oh, you haven't met the Captain's widow."

At that precise moment, the door flung inward and Conrad—who had made the mistake of standing directly in front of it—got jabbed in the forehead with a double barrel shotgun.

"Oh," Hanna said, "you must be the widow!"

-A-

The living room was strung up with ornamental plates and lace doilies, and the Captain's Widow standing in the middle of it looked like the grim reaper looming over an issue of _Better Homes and Gardens_ from 1955. Two kinds of shotgun were hung from the far wall on thick iron hooks.

"So," she said, "where did you boys say you were from?"

Hanna had his hands folded in his lap like a first-grader in the timeout corner. "California, ma'am," he managed, eyes darting desperately in search of someone else to defer to. Nobody was volunteering to help him out.

"And what brings you down to Arizona, boys?"

Conrad and Worth exchanged a brief and complicated communiqué in a sign language most composed of eyebrow lifts.

"Uh," said Hanna. "Well. We basically do nothing but travel! We're merchants you see, kind of the whole package really! Saving people, hunting things, you know."

Grandmama Death waited in absolute, waiting silence.

Hanna squirmed.

She waited.

"So nice house wow where did you get those plates with cats on them that's so old school I think my fifth grade teacher had some of those in her office gosh she was ancient I mean not that you're ancient you're looking really good for your age do you work out?"

She waited.

Conrad sighed and hid his face with both hands.

"Ma'am," the zombie cut in, mercifully, "I don't know if you're aware, but there's a sort of order that has arisen in the last year or two of a less mundane nature. We gather that your town has had some exposure to the negative side of magic. We're what you might consider the more positive side."

"Oh yeah?" the widow replied.

"Yes."

She crossed her translucent arms gracefully. "The way I see it," she said, at last, "we've got one of two options here. One, you're a pack of snakeoil salesmen looking for a quick buck, in which case I oughta have the Jones boys ride you out of town on a rail. Two, you're a bunch of dangerous characters likely to get somebody killed before you hit the highway again, and I ought to pull that over-under off the rack and blast you right across the room."

Worth would bet the contents of his ammunitions box that he wasn't the only one who looked across the room right then.

"Please," Hanna said, "Mrs—"

"Herring."

"Mrs, uh, Mrs. Herring. Do we look like dangerous people?"

The widow gave them each long, dissecting glares, her thin fingers tapping on her sleeves. "That one," she said, nodding towards Patroclus, "looks like a close personal friend of Mr. Romero. That one looks like Dracula's snotty nephew, the other one looks like Deliverance, and you're just a plain sorry customer."

Hanna ran a hand through his knotted orange hair. "Wow. You, uh, you sure watch a lot of movies."

"Look, boys, I'm the closest thing to a chance you got living in this town, so if you want to stay you better give me a damn good reason."

"Can I call a timeout for a huddle?"

"I don't think so."

"Dang it. Okay, give me a second."

In the ensuing silence, Worth pocketed a knickknack that had been placed too close to his hand.

Hanna looked up again.

"I can't actually prove that we're not a bunch of really terrible people," he started, unencouragingly, and Worth thought about the pros and cons of just knocking the guy out before he could dig them in any deeper. "I mean how do you prove that?" Hanna went on. "But we really want to help, and we've got resources and knowledge you don't have here. Wouldn't it be more to your advantage to kick us out after you've gotten some free labor out of the deal?"

Herring unfolded her arms. She was like a stone wall- if Worth didn't know that she had to be thinking it over, he'd have been tempted to believe she was a kind of breathing automaton.

"You'll be staying here, where I can keep an eye on you," she said finally, tucking her hands into her apron pockets. "You've got three days and then you're out. We'll work out some kind of equivalent exchange for food and board when I get a good look at your skill set."

"What, really?" Conrad nearly squawked, peeling his fingers away from his eyes. "Seriously?"

"Economics is economics, son," the widow replied, matter of fact. "I don't imagine a bunch of world travelers like you four haven't got a keen eye on our condition out here in the desert. Last time a truck came through here was May three years ago. Last time we saw anybody from outta town was fall the same year. Let's all try to be some kind of level with each other."

"Oh."

Herring turned her head and called over her shoulder, "Miriam! We've got guests!"

Hanna blinked. "The angry lady in the robe didn't tell us you had a sister."

"Sister," Herring snorted. "Miriam gimme a hand with the welcome wagon. Boys, this is my daughter."

Miriam walked in. Miriam was, indeed, not Herring's sister. Hanna popped up like a toaster strudel off the couch and ran across the room to snag the first introduction.

She stood about a foot over the kid, which was hilarious considering the way he was bouncing on his toes like he could break even height-wise if he just bounced high enough. She tucked a dog-eared book up under her arm and went to shake his hand.

"Heh, check out the Prairie Companion over there," Worth sniggered, elbowing Conrad in the shoulder. "Two'a ya oughter trade tips on shoppin' fer shoes in the post apocalyptic wasteland."

Goldmine. Worth had always suspected Conrad's shoes had come from the ladies' section, and now here was proof: Herring's daughter was stuffed into the same scuffed up, stupid looking boots. It made sense, of course; Conrad was both a fag, and a faggot with dainty little pixie feet not made for manly shoes. Probably needed to flounce around in something with "high arch support." Surprising how the old adage about foot size matching junk size hadn't really held true in his case—or at least, not from what little Worth had managed to feel so far.

Not that he'd felt anything except cold fucking shoulders since Christmas. Happy holidays, sweetheart. Go fuck yourself.

"Yeah," Conrad said. "Sure."

Worth furrowed his brows and went to give Conrad a skeptical look, but the poncy bastard was already stumbling across the room towards Whatsherface and the grand firestarter, still shaking her hand like it was a water pump. God damn it Hanna, she wasn't even that good looking.

Her ruddy sunburnt face sported a nose fit to rival Conrad's.

"Is that Prachett?" Conrad asked, voice uneven, like he'd forgotten how exactly to approach a person who wasn't trying to mutilate or maim him in some way.

With a half-amused kind of sideways glance, Herring's kid twisted her hand free of Hanna's impressive grip.

"Oh," she replied, with a chap-lipped grin, "yeah, it is. _Colour of Magic._ Are you a fan?"

"Yes!" Conrad replied, then speared himself through the lip as he bit down apologetically. "Er. Yes, I'm actually… a really big fan. Are you just starting it? I mean the series, are you just starting the series?"

A speck of (suspiciously bone-like) grit between Worth's molars made itself known, and he realized vaguely that he'd been grinding his teeth. There went the enamel. And the ridges.

"No, no," Herring Junior said, patting the side of the book. "Actually I'm starting it over, going to read it chronologically. I mean as much as we've got in town—I think the last one that came out never got shipped this far before—well. Things. You know."

"Oh," Conrad replied, "Yeah, of course. I think I actually still have a copy from the last raid—"

The two of them started to shuffle absentmindedly toward the edge of the room, the way you do when a private conversation seems imminent and looming.

Worth squinted after them. "Oi, don't let me keep ya," he grumbled. "Guess we ain't got the invite t' the Princess Party, huh Hanna?"

But Hanna was trailing after Conrad and Whatsherface like a lost puppy, wringing his hands and half-starting words as he moved across the linoleum.

Worth turned and raised his eyebrows at the zombie, made a gesture towards the door. "You got somewhere ya gotta be too, Slick?"

"Actually."

Worth jammed his hands into his pockets. "Feh," he snorted, "good riddance to the lot'a ya."

Maybe there was some booze in the kitchen he could nab.

-A-

Worth got his introduction to Miriam much later. This was because she seemed constantly to be in the company of Conrad from the moment she stepped in the door, and Conrad had gotten unreasonably good at shuttering Worth out of conversations in the last week or two.

At something like one in the morning, while Thelma and Louise were chatting away in the living room, Worth was sitting across the kitchen table from the Captain's Widow with a glass of lukewarm gin. She took a sip of its twin.

"What was yer husband captain'a?" he asked, scratching a nail over the quail logo painted on the side of the glass.

Herring made an ugly noise low in her throat that probably wasn't intended to sound as harsh as it did. But who knew. "Lawrence wasn't captain of anything," she replied, "except maybe a gravy boat."

"Sounds like a real winner," Worth observed, swirling his lukewarm gin. "How'de get the name then?"

"Football team, first Freshman captain they ever had," she answered. "'59. Funny how it stuck like that. You know it got to the point where the kids my daughter's age though he'd been in a war somewhere. Lawrence thought it was funny at least, god rest his soul."

"Dead long?"

"About five years now." Herring pursed her lips. "Nothing for a mourning period like a great big societal collapse. That'll pull ya right out of it."

Worth flexed his hand under the table, twisting away from the impulse to reach for the chain around his neck.

"What's the situation look like around here?" he asked, changing the subject back to something useful. "Any big skirmishes goin' on regular like? Civil unrest?"

Herring lifted one gray-blond eyebrow. "Are you aiming to join up or back out if I say yeah?"

Worth shrugged. "Depends on how well Hanna's gonna have himself occupied the next couple days. If he's got things to do, I could use some busy work myself."

"Soldier?" she asked, skeptical.

"Shit naw," the doctor replied. "Not officially anyhow. Got some battlefield medic experience, though. Last coupl'a years. Ain't actually been on any front lines yet."

There was the time in Florida, of course, but the more left unsaid about that political fiasco of a black op the better. It wasn't like he was obligated to explain anything.

"Town ain't right," Worth went on, laying down the only cards that mattered. "Yer militia's armed to th' teeth out in the middle'a bumfuck who-gives-a-shit-land, an' you tell us ya ain't seen somebody from outta town since two years ago. What ain't we bein' told?"

"Who says you need to be told anything?"

Worth grinned.

On the other side of the wall, Conrad and Whatsherface burst out laughing like a couple of nail-painting preteens. Worth's grin slid off his face.

"Lemme lay it out for ya," he said, tapping the table with one thin finger. "You got a problem. Dunno what it is, dunno whose it is, but ya got one. Me'n the boys, we got a thing fer solvin' problems. You got magic, we got magic, ain't much ter get done 'bout it till you fill us in. Ya wanna waste us on a couple days fixing roofs, sure, it's yer house. But how about ya just tell me what the hell's happenin' here an' maybe see iff'n we can't do somethin' about it."

"Is that a Tennessee accent?"

Worth frowned. "That's yer guess? Yer fuckin' kiddin' me."

Herring shrugged. "I'm no good with accents."

She stood up, empty glass in hand, and shifted some letters that had been stacked up on the countertop. A letter, smeary post-apocalypse printed, came out of the bottom of the stack.

"This showed up on nearly every doorstep in town about a month after the cable stopped working. The mail had stopped coming a couple weeks before that."

She handed him the paper and crossed her arms, waiting. Worth squinted down at the smudged gray print.

**The Winds of Change**

**At this point in your life, you are probably coming to the conclusion that things won't be going back the way they were. McKenly's grocer hasn't restocked in weeks. The president hasn't been heard from since channel 7 went off the air. You're probably coming to the conclusion that even if America's scientist came up with a full proof cure overnight, things will never really go back to the way they were. When Bank of America shut down—maybe you heard about that, maybe word hasn't reached you yet—we signed our resignation papers from the cushy first class world we've been inhabiting. We're at war now, with nature and soon, maybe each other.**

**Maybe you're starting to wonder how you can join the winning side.**

That was it. Doc Worth looked up, waiting.

"I don't know if you've had time to wonder yet," Herring said, blue-gray eyes like storm clouds gathering in the middle of the kitchen, "but sooner or later, you're gonna. You wanna know where we get our food?"

"Lady," Doc Worth warned, "if yer gonna tell me ya done gone Texas Chainsaw in this town, I think I'm gonna need another drink."

An odd, bent smile broke the severity of her lined face. "You seen anybody like that?"

"Alphabetical or chronological?" Worth replied, although the list probably wasn't long enough to warrant that kind of ordering. In all honesty, even one instance was one instance too many.

Herring looked at him like she wasn't sure if he was pulling her leg. Eventually, she gave up picking at his poker face and settled on a shrug. "That's not us, thank God," she told him, "we got a surprisingly nice deal here, and that's just the thing. We—am I going to have to explain this to your redheaded friend again tomorrow?"

Worth waved her off. "I'll fill 'im in."

"Fine by me. Boy talks like he's got a jet engine attached to his mouth." Herring pushed off the edge of the counter and busied herself putting away glasses, moving mechanically. "We aren't the only ones living in this desert," she started, at last, tossing a nearly dry towel into a drawer. "Used to be a neighboring town, of course, but the survivors holed up with us pretty quickly when things started going south. Never did get much disease around here. But that's not what I'm talking about."

Herring gestured towards the window over the sink, the glass filmed with frost. Beyond it, in the sweeping darkness, a pinprick of what might have been distant light shimmered. Worth could have easily mistaken it for a glare on the pane, if he had noticed it at all.

"That's what's left of White Town, minus most of its original occupancy. In the old days, you couldn't have seen that light from here. After they evacuated the place, it was dark for a while, and then… light. By that point we were rationing gas, so it was a while before we got damned curious enough to see about it. Wish we hadn't, now. Wish we'd just up and left this desert while we still had the juice. You think anybody out there woulda taken us?"

"Not 'less ya came with an apple in yer mouth, I figure."

"Yeah, me too. Wishing doesn't hurt though. The first guy we sent back to White Town didn't come back. Spooked the hell out of us. Most everybody who had the disease was dead by then, and we really thought we were done losing folks. We were still getting flyers, then, and nobody knew where they were coming from."

Herring reached across the chasm between them and took up the first flyer, fingers smudging the grayscale ink.

"So eventually we sent another guy, and by then we were hurting pretty bad for supplies. A day, we don't hear anything. Some of us are talking about taking all the gas and making a last stand of it. Then Bruno—his name was Bruno—comes back the next night, with a truck bed full of corn in these big plastic barrels. Says he's made provisions for us. What kind of provisions, we ask him."

Herring's hands curled down on the paper, creasing it sharply in jagged patterns.

"A half year's worth, he tells us. Won't say anything more on the subject. Food keeps coming in, Bruno keeps running his truck between us, and we live. At the end of the year, Bruno starts talking funny. Will and testament kind of talk. The day that the year's up, Bruno disappears right out of town, and we never see him again. The next morning, a flyer shows up on the courthouse. I don't have that one, but the jist of it was that we ought to send somebody over next door to talk about renewing the contract. _Contract_? we say. What contract?"

"What contract?" Worth echoed, pursing his lips. There were only a couple ways this could be going, and none of them were good news.

"Exactly. Everybody's in a panic. So I go on over my damn self, since everybody else is wringing their hands like a bunch of grannies. Me and Brendan Thompson's boy, we load up and we drive over, and the town is… strung up. Buildings gutted, big simmering firepit outside the courthouse doesn't even smoke, and at first it looks empty. Then the boys come out—couldn't one of them been over thirty five, some a lot younger. They have this kind of… military look."

Herring sighed and patted at her pocket, the idle search of the used-to-be smoker.

"The long and short of it is that we made a deal. We didn't understand it, but they wanted Brendan Thompson's boy. At the time, I thought it was a recruitment deal. Military like. But now, I don't think that was it at all. He said yeah, of course. I tried to see if I could switch with him, but they weren't interested in picking up Granny Crocker. You know, the whole time we were in that town, I never saw a cornfield." She paused for a moment, brows lined deeply across her paper skin.

"So how's the story end?" Worth asked.

"With another flyer," Herring answered. "This June will be our fourth deal. Last year we lost Shannon Quan. Disease got her husband, back at the beginning. I guess she was ready to go." She gave him a thin-lipped look that said plainly how just how much they had expected to see that lady again. "They want somebody younger."

"Younger?" Worth echoed, lifting an eyebrow. "How young're we talkin?"

"Too young to know what they're agreeing to."

"From the sound of it," Worth observed, "ya don't much know what it is yerselves."

Herring pursed her lips and untied her apron, throwing it over the chair at the bar.

"No. And that's exactly why I don't plan to stand for it another year."

-A-

The next day dawned thin and chill, and there was a leak in the roof. As it turned out, this was probably the worst thing the crew could have been tasked to deal with, on account of not one of them owning their own damn house since childhood. Hanna was the closest thing to an expert on hand, with a little experience patching up the hellhole of an apartment now and then—if there was one thing Hanna was good for, it was picking useful things up through simple repetitive pigheaded stubbornness.

Ultimately, Herring had to come up on the roof with them for an hour and hand out directions with a side of verbal lashing until everyone figured out what they were supposed to be doing. This was exactly what Worth had been talking about when he got into dumb fucking wastes of resources, but when he pulled up beside Herring to give her a piece of his mind, she wasn't having any of it.

"You want to come into town pulling rabbits out of hats like a traveling circus?" she asked him, tossing a hammer to Gallahad, who despite his various mortises managed to catch it pretty deftly. "This town's so high strung you'd have a lynch mob on your hands in a day."

"No, no," Hanna cut in, "Worth, I totally see what she's getting at. We look super useful and like, sincere and stuff if we pitch in kind of visible like. Big team player gesture, y'know?"

"We look like a damn three ring circus," Worth grumbled, stalking up the side of the roof with a defiant slouch. "If ya wanna get the people's guard down so bad, put on some red shoes and a rainbow bleedin' afro."

"I wish it was a four ring circus," Hanna sighed, "Conrad is a total boss when it comes to detail work."

Worth sneered. "Li'l miss sunshine's havin' a grand old time downstairs without us, I reckon. This late in the mornin' they're probably paintin' their nails."

Herring cocked an eyebrow at him, but he didn't particularly feel the need to elaborate. Actually, some good old fashioned banging things with hammers was sounding better now.

At 11 o'clock in the morning, despite the snappish January air, Worth was starting to feel a swampy heat coalescing under his collar. When he glanced across the roof, Hanna was looking like a radiator in his jacket. Arizona wasn't too far a cry from places further south, except that it was drier than somebody's mouth the morning of a hangover. Looked like he might have to drop the jacket altogether pretty soon.

There was a series of noises from down on the ground, but years of complicated medical procedures performed while a patient was bleeding out on a dining room table or god knew where else had taught him how to focus on the task at hand. Manual tasks brought out the concentration in him. It wasn't until Hanna shook his shoulder that he bothered to look up at all.

"Come on," the younger man was saying, "there's lunch and drinks and stuff!"

Worth spat out a screw that he'd been worrying absentmindedly. "Here's hopin' ya mean real fuckin' drinks and not some tapwater."

"No, it's tapwater," Hanna grinned, "but hey, if it was alcohol you wouldn't let me drink it anyhow."

"Damn straight I wouldn'," Worth muttered, "not the way you been workin'."

Hanna swung down the ladder to the ground in record time and left the doctor to amble his way over to the edge of the roof and peer down. Speculatively, he considered the repast. Water. Goddamn. Something that looked like hardtack and… pinkish jam. Barberry probably. Alright.

The person holding the tray was less desirable, though.

"Doc!" Miriam called up, raising an over-friendly hand. "Come down and get some! Hanna looks like he's got an eye on your portion."

Worth's lips thinned a bit. "Yer mum send ya out ter coddle us?"

"Nah," she replied, "sent myself out! Now seriously, come down here."

"Ain't hungry. Let Hanna have my share."

Hanna rolled his eyes. "He does that sometimes. I dunno how he manages it, if I skipped meals like that I'd just probably pass out or something. Pass the jam."

Miriam frowned and crossed her arms, orange sweater bunching around her shoulders. "That's not healthy. You're much bigger than Hanna, you need more calories than he does."

"Oi," Worth snapped, "who's the medical professional around here?"

"Oh just let me feed you already."

"I ain't done up here," Worth replied, "an' I ain't hungry neither."

"Luce!"

Worth whipped up ramrod straight, and glared down the barrel of his nose at the woman on the ground. "Listen here lady, you 'n me ain't on first name terms , an' when I figure out who spilled that one I'm gonna give him a helluva talkin' to."

Miriam gave him an incredulous look and exchanged a bewildered one with Hanna on the side.

"Uh," she said. "Okay. Well, I'll just leave your lunch for you, then. In case you… get hungry later. Doctor."

"He's not even a real doctor," Hanna mumbled, making a displeased face into his toast.

"I know," Miriam muttered back, and then turned inefficient patent-leather heel on the whole scene. Worth waited until the front door fell closed with a muffled bang, and then leaned over the edge of the roof.

"Toss me up some'a that jam," he said, and ignored Hanna's deeply put-upon sigh as he complied.

-A-

Herring and the World's Shortest Wonderboy disappeared sometime in the middle of the afternoon, leaving the Doctor and the dead guy to their unending menial labor. This was exactly the kind of thing Worth had been trying to avoid when he went to medical school. Hanna was probably putting on some flashy Siegfried and Roy routine in the house with the convenient wind-blocking walls, meanwhile Worth was out here dismantling a car for parts. Ought to have been Conrad's job, the sorry bastard.

Although the widow Herring's house was located more or less at the center of the still-inhabited part of town, for most of the day, Worth didn't see much in the way of people. Some time late-afternoon, the first real visitor stopped at the door, shuffling anxiously as the zombie gracefully sidestepped her on his way from the half-gutted automobile.

Herring met her at the door, while Worth busied himself with a task coincidentally nearby. Pure happenstance.

"Mrs. Herring," the woman started.

"Julia," Herring corrected, "Gus and me were at your wedding, you don't have to stand on formality now."

"Mrs. Julia," the woman tried again. "Word's going around that you won't support the new contract in the spring."

"Yes."

The woman blinked. "Yes?"

"Yes, no, whatever," Herring flicked a dismissive hand. "I'm not supporting it. Not again."

"_Julia_," the woman responded. "Think about this! What'll we do if there isn't—"

"Marcella," Herring interrupted, "have you ever known me not to have a plan?"

The stranger shifted uncomfortably, but didn't seem to have a reply.

"Look," the widow sighed, "I'm working on something. You all got to have some faith, alright? I'm the same as anybody else, I want to keep on living as long as I can. I won't get any of us killed if I can help it."

Marcella pursed her lips and tucked her hands into the pockets of her jeans. "Alright."

"There's got to be a limit," Herring remarked, putting a hand on the woman's shoulder. "There has to be a point where you step back and ask yourself how far you're really willing to go."

Marcella put up her hands, surrendering. "I trust you," she said. "You know I do. It's just… not everybody does, you know?"

"Trust me," Herring replied, shaking out her apron, "I know."

Marcella said her goodbyes and carried on her way towards wherever she was going—there wasn't as much in the way of farming in this town, the desert being what it was, so what the people did all day long was a was a mystery to Worth. Sounded like a lot of scheming and politicking so far, but then that might just be shitty timing on the visitation front. Seemed like they were always popping into places at exactly the worst time.

Worth abandoned the whole pretence of useful work and walked up to the door, where Herring was watching her friend disappearing down the road with a hard expression.

"Yer bigger fish than ya let on," he noted, settling himself into the plaster beside her.

"Town this small, any old goldfish is a big fish."

"Ya got some political clout, though," he insisted. "They di'n send us ter ya just 'cause yer handy with a shotgun."

"No," she answered, drawing the syllable out like a sigh. "Guess they didn't."

"When y'gonna tell 'em?" he asked.

Herring didn't say anything for a while, her faded blue eyes scanning the empty street for something. The sky was the same dusty color, the two equally pensive in the uncertain January wind. "Tonight," she said at last.

Worth tapped the wall. "I'm comin' with ya."

"You?"

Worth shrugged. "Me 'r Hanna. Yer call."

"Why would I do that?"

Again, a shrug. "Mostly cause I got a feelin'," he said, "things're gonna get real ugly real fast, an' the sooner we get in, the less people're gonna die."

As a man who had lived through the collapse of one civilization and the dissolution of several smaller clusterfucks, the doctor felt that he had a pretty good sense of which way the wind was really blowing.

-A-

It was decided by popular vote that Worth was absolutely not allowed to go with Herring to the town hall meeting that night. Conrad brought up the time that he had nearly singlehandedly caused a minor civil war in Virginia by hitting on the wrong Governor's daughter, and after that nobody was too keen on letting him leave the house again. Apparently ever. Worth sat sour in the corner and chewed a toothpick down to splinters while the rest of the room talked policy. Lousy thunder-grabbing traitors. See if he told the bastards anything _next_ time they ran into a hotbed of political instability.

While he seethed, a thin cloud of white smoke went up from the black spot on the horizon. No one paid it much mind—not then, at least.

In the end, Hanna went alone with Herring.

There's an antsy feeling you get sometimes when it feels like you ought to be doing something that you don't have the means to do—twitchy, like an addict eyeing a closed cabinet. Worth had a couple methods for dealing with that feeling, when just barging through and taking care of business wasn't possible. First thing on that list was ragging on Conrad, a time honored and highly recommended method with a killer success rate.

The twat was still glued to junior of course, and Worth paused for a moment to contemplate which of them was twat and which of them was junior. Ultimately, he figured he had it right the first time.

Worth slung an arm around Conrad's shoulder and bent down over the back of the sofa where the dynamic duo had been sitting for the last ten minutes. He grinned as much at the Herring kid's uncomfortable wriggle as Conrad's immediate lock-joint stiffness. Good old Conniekins, stiff in all the wrong ways. As usual.

"Noticed ya weren't lobbyin' too hard to get outta the house," Worth observed, still grinning, although some of the humor had already seeped out of it. "Gonna have dinner on th' table fer 'em when they get home?"

"Can you cook?" Miriam asked, somewhere between discomfort and interest.

"Yeah," Conrad replied, lips pursed, "but that's not why he's asking."

"Oh… uh?"

"Connie here's our portable little housewife," Worth exposited graciously, "for our portable little home, ain't that right?"

Conrad's pained expression actually looked a little painful itself. "Worth, can you at least do me the _tiny_, insignificant favor of _not_ undermining my masculinity in front of strangers?"

"Aw, but we ain't strangers no more," Worth replied, showing molars. "Me 'n yer BFFsie got proper introduced yesterday, didn't we sugar?"

"I don't think I'd really call that an introduction," she said, clearly nonplussed.

Worth waved her off with the hand that was hanging a over her shoulder. "Eh," he said. "Point is, we're all one big happy family now."

Miriam frowned, a little skeptical. "Is that how you welcome family around here?"

"Here, there, sure, wotever"

"Worth," Conrad hissed, "you didn't."

"di'n wot?" Worth asked, brow cocked. "All I—"

There was a knock at the door.

Miriam sprang up from the couch, patted non-existent dust from her jeans and then said, "I'll get that."

The second she was out of sight, Conrad swung around and grabbed Worth by the collar of his beaten up button down. The way his lip was pulled back, his longer fang glittered at the point.

"What is your problem?" he demanded, yanking the green cotton unnecessarily. Unlike some people, Worth had limited wardrobe. If Conrad ripped that thing, he was down a sixth of his closet.

"Me?" Worth retorted, "I ain't got a problem. What, man can't chip in ta make friendly with the lady? Ya done plenty enough yerself, 's only fair I get a turn."

"You think I'm _stupid_?"

"As yer so fond'a remindin' me, I ain't the one who graduated with a big shiny degree, am I?"

"Don't pull that passive aggressive shit with me, Worth, I'm so done with it."

Worth scowled. "Oi pot, ya looked at yer bum lately?"

"Well _kettle_, maybe it takes one to know one!"

"Guys?" Miriam called, cutting through the miasma of a fight about to break out. "I'd feel a lot better if I could have some back up right now."

Worth vaulted over the couch almost as fast as Conrad could stand up and head for the door. Miriam was planted defensively in the atrium eyeing a white pickup truck parked on the scrub of what passed for her lawn. Its headlights lit up the front wall, pale against the fading greenish sky.

"What is it?" Conrad asked, quickly. "People you know?"

"Not so far," Miriam replied, and allowed a preoccupied moment for the implications of that sentence to set in.

"White Town?" Worth guessed, ducking back into the living room for his rifle. Not much of a close range weapon, but faster to get his hands on and more familiar besides.

"Maybe," Miriam said. "Nothing else I can think of."

The driver's door of the pickup truck swung open, and the sizable silhouette of a man stepped out.

"Ominous," Conrad muttered, more sour than anything. "Yes well that always leads to wonderful places."

The man from the truck approached them, what looked like poorly polished army boots smacking the brickwork path. The closer he came, the better Worth could make out the nasty scar across his cheek, a pitted pinkish Y stretching up into the blockish side of his nose. He looked like any other roughneck backwoods survivor, but there was something in the way he moved—

"Hey," he called out, smiling, "I need to talk with Widow Herring."

Miriam crossed her arms. "Sorry, she's already left. Can I help you?"

Scar-face's smile unwound a crank. "For the town hall," he clarified, and it probably ought to have been a question, even though it clearly wasn't.

"Yeah," Miriam answered. "I'm sorry, do we know you?"

"You don't," the man clarified. He stuck out his hand, huge and dark and scarred up the wrist like a shimmering stain leaching out at the edges. "Name's Jackson. Miguel Jackson."

Miriam shook his hand with a certain wary kind of chilliness. "I'm Miriam Herring," she replied. "This is Conrad Achenleck and Doc Worth. They're staying with us."

"Huh. Well your mama and me have something to talk about, and I had really hoped to catch her before she left tonight."

"What's that?"

Jackson tugged a pack of camels out of his pocket, tapped one perfectly white cylinder free and slid it between his teeth. He gestured toward the three of them, offering silently. Worth—never one to turn down anything free, let alone a cigarette—plucked one free before junior or Conrad could give him any nasty looks. Boohoo yeah he was a traitor. But a traitor with a four inch roll of paper that could probably buy a middling class hooker in one of the larger sized surviving cities.

"Mr. Jackson," Miriam pushed, the pinkish burnt skin of her forehead wrinkling. "What did you need to talk to my mother about?"

"Contracts," Jackson answered succinctly, lighting up with the quick flick motion of someone well practiced.

"Great," Miriam said, fingers tapping on her arm. "Town Hall's one block down and follow the street left till you hit the building with the lights on. I'm sure they'll all be real interested in whatever you're peddling."

"I'm sure they will," Jackson hummed. "Word is you're all thinking about going it on your own come March."

"How come we never see any of the people we send over to White Town?" Miriam responded, eyes narrowing.

The scarred man regarded them through the pale smoke of his cigarette, dark eyes cool and calculating for a flickering moment.

"On second thought," he sighed, at last, breaking into an inviting half-smile, "I don't think I'll be stopping by town hall after all. Tell your momma I said hi."

Worth sniggered over the Herring girl's shoulder. "Wot," he said, "'fraid'a playin' twen'y questions with the lady?"

"Not really," Jackson replied, turning his back with a half-wave. "I'll get the news later tonight anyways. It probably doesn't matter much what they decide, if I know my boys."

He paused with his hand on the white door of the truck, its dustless curve half-glowing in the settling darkness. Even this far away, his teeth were visible as he grinned across the lawn.

"I think it's about time we looked into expanding the company."

As the monster of a truck rumbled away in a flash of headlights, Worth grit his teeth and shot Conrad a glance—their looks met in the middle, crackling around the back of Miriam's head like invisible telephone wires.

"Think ya may've called it with that ominous bit," Worth admitted, lifting his gold-trove cigarette to his lips. "Can't say that sounds like it's goin' anywhere good."

Now where did he stash his lighter.

-TBC-


	2. Chapter 2

_Facing the Bullets_

Looks like it's going to be three chapters after all. This may or may not be good news. Profuse thanks to Vaysh who wrote for both the confrontation scenes and just generally is wonderful!

* * *

I'm trying, I'm trying  
To let you know just how much you mean to me  
And after all the things we put each other through and-

-"Demolition Lovers"

_Nearly Three Years After_

_Arizona_

Hanna and Herring came home triumphant that night. Apparently they'd done a damn good job of talking the community around over the last couple hours. A gaggle of townsfolk had followed them back to the house, murmuring amongst themselves about various political things that Worth could only half-bring himself to care about—the over-enthusiastic nod Hanna had given him through the window said everything he needed to know. Things were about to change, and he was about to be in the middle of it.

There was a kind of sickly satisfaction in that. Part of him knew that even months ago, he wouldn't have been so pleased to hear it. But things were different now.

So the word was that if Hanna promised to stick around and teach some of the locals how to not starve—he'd have his work cut out for him yeah, and he'd probably drag the rest of them into project Shotgun Grade School too—they'd agree to cut contract with White Town's mysterious suppliers. Great. Fun. Hanna lit up describing it, drawing out the play by play of a two-hour Democracy gone wild in its natural habitat like he'd been ring side in the prizefight of the century. Worth found himself waiting. And waiting. He should have interrupted before Hanna could build up his head of steam.

He should have, but he didn't, and it just kept getting worse.

Hanna was half way into his description of how Herring _pwned_ the pro-contract debater when Conrad slapped his hand down on the coffee table and stood up like a whip snapping. He glared at Worth.

"Are you really going to make me tell him?" the vampire demanded, jamming a hand over the curve of his hip.

The doctor shrugged. "Don't gotta be you," he replied. "Yer Ladylove could do it."

Conrad opened his mouth, then snapped it closed and lifted a single warning finger. "We'll talk about that later," he snapped, "right now somebody's got to head this off at the pass. Hanna, I don't think this town seceding from the union is as great as we all thought."

Hanna made a quizzical face, all orange eyebrows and tilted head. "Con-man, are you like, suddenly a proponent of human sacrifice or something?"

"Oh my god," Conrad muttered, clutching the bridge of his generous nose. "Am I actually the only person here who has considered what a community who accept human sacrifice might _be like?_ What they might want to _do?"_

"Uh."

"Okay fine, I'll explain it since Worth apparently has _better things to do_. Whatever they're doing with those people. It isn't nice. Nothing is ever nice. Okay, I have just about forgotten the meaning of nice at this point! Those guys, by extension are also _not nice_. On top of that, they clearly have resources that we don't. Now I don't know if any of you were paying attention in school when they were teaching colonial history, but do any of you have any idea what happens when an underpowered minority suddenly refuses to cooperate with a big, well armed neighbor?"

Hanna's expression dropped like a stone rattling down a cliff.

"Somebody from across the way stopped by while you were gone," Miriam explained to her mother, reaching up neatly but firmly and pulling Conrad back down into the sofa with a muffled thud. "His name was Miguel Jackson. Do you know him?"

Herring clenched her teeth. "You wouldn't remember him," she said. "Miguel used to live in town. He was maybe five years older than you—went off into the army when he was nineteen. Came back… do you remember when you were a senior and the police came by to talk to me? Miguel was in town a week before he dropped off the map. Mother worried sick. You get your kid back from Afghanistan and you lose him in the goddamn grocery store."

"Explains the scar," Worth observed, kicking his feet up on the coffee table. Explained the way he walked too, but that was an observation he figured he might as well keep to himself.

Hanna held up a hand. "Okay whoa hey, can we just slow down for a second? So this mysterious neighboring town has a lot of food, an army guy, and nobody can tell me for sure if they've got magic. By the way, worst part of the meeting was trying to talk rationally about magic with Pastor Michael McBurn-the-Witch. So far, I'm not seeing what the big hoo-ha is?"

"He just had this—"

"If you'd seen how—"

"Bloke was talkin'—"

The three of them broke off and gave each other various uncertain looks. Conrad dropped his head into his hand and gestured at Worth with too much flair to be sincerely gracious. Whatever. When was the princess _not_ feeling pissy, there was a real question for you.

"Figure he was tryin'a scare us," Worth explained, fingers tapping in a preoccupied wave over the arm of the chair. "But yer boy Jackson got in somethin' about _expandin'_ before he went speedin' off inter the sunset. Got a feelin' the neighbors might be down ter talkin' some annexation. Got a bad feelin' it ain't all talk, either."

Hanna frowned, settling his chin on his folded hands. "He could be bluffing. We have no idea what kind of man power he's actually got."

"Could be," Worth granted. "Herring, what'd ya say that town looked like?"

"Not empty," the widow answered grimly. "Pretty well renovated, to tell the truth, though it didn't much look like your usual fixings."

Hanna slumped in the rocking chair, sighing. "I was gonna plant corn," he said to nobody in particular. "There's just enough to spare, we could have planted a field's worth. I was gonna teach them speed-growing spells. Hephaestion already found a chapter about agriculture around here in that big farmer's guide we picked up. I was gonna dig a new well. The manual pumps on the one they've got are breaking down."

"You can still do that, Hanna," Hephaestion pointed out, gently.

"Yeah," said Hanna, flatly. "Sure."

If a room could sigh in disappointment, Worth had the strangest feeling the walls around him would be doing so in that moment. Even his own keen interest—something more heavy than excitement, less optimistic, but still sharp—was dulled by the doleful air settling around him. Worth toyed for a moment with the idea of packing them all up and leaving town, but there was no way for him to make Hanna leave if he himself planned to stay. Kid was stubborn like that. Fat chance of selling him on a "come pick me up in a month" type plan.

"So," the doctor said instead, "what're we gonna do, then? We got a cours'a action?"

"We'll need to make the town defensible," Hanna replied, not quite mechanically. But close.

"Side opposite White Town's got a gorge," Worth replied, "so our backs're up against somethin' defensible. Mebbe a blockade on the other end. Ground's too hard an' cold fer diggin'. Ain't gonna be no trench."

"Cars," Hanna suggested, looking away finally from his vague fixation on the ceiling, "decay hasn't been too bad around here, they might still be movable."

"Right. Most of 'em still got keys somewhere around, could get into neutral and push. That's defense down. What next."

"We'd need to investigate," Hanna replied, sitting up a little bit. "See how many people they have, and get the scope down on their fire power. Top priority would be figuring out if they've got magic or not—and if they've got it, like, how much and how strong and all that stuff. Oh and we'll want to get into contact pretty fast. If Miguel was just a free radical bouncing around, it might be enough to put on some kinda… show of force I guess. Make us look harder to take down. See if anybody really wants to expend the effort."

"Yer wantin' a ninja squad fer the first bit," Worth clarified "Sneak in sneak out, no frills."

"Sure, yeah," Hanna said. "Some people who can assess the situation all quiet like, on the DL. I'll go with them to get a feel for the magic part."

"Ya sure as shit _won't_," Worth snapped, sitting forward. His hands hung between his legs, arms across the tops of thighs. This was his Serious As a Goddamn Heart Attack pose, and Hanna knew it.

"Well who else is gonna do it?" Hanna frowned. "You know anybody else in town who can scan for paranormal activity? Gee, maybe they've even been doing it for _nearly ten years_."

"Don't you sass me, Cross, I still ain't lettin' you go."

"Jeeze, okay, fine, whatever."

"Y'kin look fer somebody else tomorrow."

"I said _okay_."

"Okay then."

They stared at each other for a minute. Conrad coughed pointedly from his spot on the couch, but Worth only flipped him off without breaking eye contact.

A silent agreement was reached.

Hanna stood up and stretched. "Well, I'm pretty much steamrolled flat at this point, soooo if nobody needs anything else I'm just gonna go hit the hay. Hephaestion, you coming now or later?"

"I'll be up in a moment," the dead man answered. "Carry on as you would."

"If you boys need anything, let me know," Widow Herring said, standing with a half-stumble poorly concealed. "I'll be up for a while yet."

"Mom," junior said, "it's eleven o'clock and you've been all over town today."

"Yeah?" Herring replied, fixing her long dress. "That a fact?"

"_Mom_."

"I've got planning to do," Herring said, waving her daughter away. "Doctor, you come with me. I'll want your opinions on a few things, if you've got the know-how you claim to. Romero, you too."

The zombie moved easily to his feet, dipping his head a little in acquiescence. "Will that be my name for the duration, or are you planning on taking up Hanna's example?"

"Just the one's good enough for me," Herring said. She gestured sharply towards the dark office where thin moonlight cut a line across the floor.

Conrad gave her an odd look, and then Worth, as if he was uncertain whether to feel grateful or betrayed. Conrad had never much liked the arguments that came from late night meetings starting with "I'll want your opinions"—the talking with strangers, the strategies—but he knew enough to feel a secret in the air, to sense that he was being left out of something important.

Worth straightened his shoulders, chewing away on some of the cold satisfaction he got from Conrad's expression. The rest he saved for later.

An hour later, Worth was glad they'd left Hanna out of the brainstorming session. If things went the way they were looking to go, it would be a lot easier to sell the magician on an airtight argument than a slipshod one cobbled together from hunches and pessimism. And Worth would rather have it too, for obvious reasons having to do with the eventual implementation of any proposed plan.

But it was better to work it out now, without Hanna. Telling him that night would only have upset him, and he hadn't sprung back from the last letdown well at all.

Worth excused himself while Herring was in the "ladiesroom"—ignoring the fact that it was house and not a restaurant, okay, sure—and went to take a smoke break somewhere outside the house. The woman had draconian fucking laws about where a man could or couldn't smoke, like getting the stuff in your furniture wouldn't do you more good than harm these days. On his way out of the house, Worth passed a lit room with the door a little cracked.

Conrad's voice murmured through the yellow slit. Well, Worth never turned down an opportunity to get illicit information on anyone, let alone someone he—

Worth tapped the wall, softly but rapidly

—dealt with so often. And he had plenty a year of practice at listening in on girly pajama parties for useful tidbits. His sister had lost herself more potential boyfriends that way.

"Come on," Miriam was saying, "I've known you for a day and even I can tell you're—"

"I'm fine," Conrad replied, "I promise. I'm fine. I just—you know—I'm… tired."

"Tired?"

"Yeah, I… Tired of… yeah. It's been years and I guess it's really starting to register that this isn't ever going to be… normal, not really, never again. We went home you know. A while back. My apartment isn't even standing anymore. Mostly I'm tired of moving all the time, I guess?"

"You guys don't get vacations?"

Conrad sighed—Worth could picture exactly the lines on his forehead that would crease, exactly how he would go to rub tiredly at the delicate skin underneath his eye. "Vacations aren't the problem. Vacations are just going somewhere new. I don't want to go somewhere new."

"Are you homesick?"

"No, no it's not—well it's not just that. This isn't where I wanted to be at thirty years old, I—god, I'm thirty-one."

There was a long pause. Worth pressed the door with one finger, slipping it just open enough that he could see a sliver of the room. If he shifted just right, he could see a bit of Conrad.

"I always wanted a family, you know," Conrad said, something in his voice fragile like packed glass. "I didn't think… it never seemed likely. It was one of those pipe dreams. Um. Some kids want to be astronauts. I wanted one of those white picket fence families."

"Okay," Herring Junior said. "What's stopping you?"

Conrad chewed his lip, and a brackish smear started over the pale pink skin. "I don't… date well," he said, after a while. "The last couple years it's all been a bunch of running and shooting at things and I don't even know what passes for normal with the rest of the world now. And… I could never find anybody to settle down with. Even back when I had friends and… prospects, I guess."

The cow rested her chin on her hand. "I know what you mean," she sighed.

"You do. You do?"

"Sure," she answered. "This is a small town. I've known most of the guys my age since I was in grade school. At the tender age of twenty-five, I've run my way through every half-decent bachelor in town, and there's nobody left for me. You don't get much out of life around here, not anymore; the cable's gone and my Iron Chef DVDs are scratched and my nails are permanently fused with potting soil. Love is about all we have left, I think. And I used all mine up."

Conrad frowned, but it was a soft frown. A sad frown. Almost alien, the way it smoothed his sharp corners and rounded his eyes.

"You'll find somebody," Conrad told her. His hand twitched, hesitated, and then settled loosely over hers.

Worth closed the fucking door and took his fucking smoke break.

-A-

Herring broke them up just a little after he got back. There wasn't much more to talk about, not beyond the hypothetical, and the old bitch was tough as old leather but she wasn't superhuman. It was late, of course she'd be zapped. Worth wasn't the least bit tired obviously, but he was gracious about letting the elderly get their naps. In fact he was so not tired that he left the house entirely and climbed up into the camper, far away from the bedroom he'd been sharing with Hanna.

Though the back room felt hollow and wrong without Conrad, at least Worth knew he could get a little peace and quiet in there. He didn't want to think so much as to not think. Just sit, smoke, zone the fuck out. He wasn't an idiot. He could read the lay of the land and he knew what was coming.

He knew what was coming on both fronts.

Sometime after entering the backroom he must have fallen asleep, although he maintained that he hadn't actually been tired. When he woke up again, it was late afternoon, and the air had grown colder despite the past noon, the tiny far away sun glittering white in a dusty sky. For a few hours he did his lifting and carrying bit around town, pitching in with whatever needed pitching in with and keeping an eye on Hanna, who seemed to have gotten completely distracted from any ninja recruiting ventures by some doe-eyed housewife's plea for magical assistance.

The afternoon faded into evening with little of note likely to happen. Sometimes, when the venue allowed, Worth would straighten up and glance across the wide brown desert at the dark speck of White Town. No plumes of dust in the thin sunlight, no flashes of light broke the falling darkness. The scrub between them seemed to hold its breath.

By the time the men of the town had been convinced to start the harrowing task of forming their amateur blockade, Worth had already slipped off back to the RV. Hey, he was reluctantly willing to put on this whole show of good faith for the yokels, but he drew the line at pushing rusted trucks up a hill. He very nearly almost had most of a college degree, after all.

Worth clasped the side door's handle and pulled it open with the squealing protest of often abused metal. The sun had gone down, and it was only a matter of time before Conrad woke and started a brand new sleepover girl talk with the beached sea cow. He really didn't want to hang around for that. He was done with it. So fucking done.

The RV was pitch black on the inside, and he worked his way to the back bedroom by feel and memory. Here was the table he always knocked his thigh on. Here the kitchenette, sink and linoleum countertop cool beneath fingers. And the door just ahead, wood paneled and surprisingly heavy. The knob turned easily in his hand as he opened the door-

-and jumped back snarling as he was temporarily blinded by light.

Immediately he grabbed for his pistol, swinging it up in a practiced and careful arc, squinting as pupils narrowed and vision sharpened. Shapes took a more familiar form and his upper lip curled, thumb resting on the safety.

"Get th' fuck outta my stuff!"

Hands in the air, Miriam's eyes were more white than iris. "_Jesus_! Put that away!"

"Who let you in here?"

"I did! It's not like it was locked!"

"Ain't yer place!" Red rage boiled under his skin, hands starting to quiver slightly. "'s mine!"

"And Conrad's."

_Oh fuck you, you snotty bint_. "Don't 'xactly see him here."

"Look, can you please,_ for the love of God_, please put that gun down."

"I can. Yeah."

"Will you?"

"Ain't made up my mind yet." And hell, if that wasn't the truest thing he'd said in some time.

"Okay, okay, fine," her voice was slow and low, reasoning with a crazy man. "Look, I just came in here because Conrad said he had a few shirts that could use a wash and some mending. So I'm just going to get those shirts and I'll leave, okay?"

She had the gall to bend over then, and pick up a shirt. His body had holstered his pistol and grabbed her by the shoulder before his brain had caught up with his body. "Leave it."

Her sunburned and peeling face hardened, hands forming fists. "Yeah, that's some way to treat a lady."

"Guess ya ain't never seen how I treat the Lady Achenleck, then."

"Who?"

"_Conrad_."

"Oh, well in that case, no, I _haven't_." She outright glared at that point, having apparently decided Worth wasn't actually going to shoot her. He wasn't as sure of her safety as she seemed to be. "I've heard enough, though."

That was an accusation. That was a blatant accusation, coming from this woman who hadn't had hardly two conversations with him, who didn't know shit all about a damn thing, this outsider barging into his room and knocking around his life with her heavy impractical shoes. Worth's lips curled back in a snarl.

"Saved his life fer three goddamn years."

"And treated him like shit the entire time."

"Don't. Don't ya fuckin'_ dare_." He pushed her back until her legs hit the edge of the bed, pure white rage suddenly flipping and turning his insides glacial. "You ain't got no right ter sit there 'n' act like ya know th' first goddamn thing 'bout me an' him."

"Yeah? Is that right? I've seen you walking around here like you own the place, grumping and being the nastiest, sourest person I may have ever met. And then I talk to Conrad, easily one of the most amazing people I've ever met, so let me tell _you_ I'm not having any trouble buying a single thing he's told me so far."

"_Ain't none a yer business_."

"No, it _is_ my business. _Conrad_ is my business."

Worth was quiet briefly. He could feel himself at a breaking point, so tired, physically, mentally, and... just strung out. Stretched like hide on a tanning rack, growing thinner with each pass of the leather worker's tools. About the time he finally opened his mouth, he heard the absolute last person he'd wanted to deal with tonight.

"Well. Hope I'm not interrupting anything."

Back to the door, Worth kept his eyes on Miriam, even as she shrugged out of his now limp fingered grasp of her shoulder. "No. Just getting some shirts and the doctor and I startled each other." As she moved past Worth, his gaze refocused on the back window, painted black and reinforced with black painted cardboard they had glued across it as an extra safety measure.

"Oh." Did Conrad sound softer? "I was going to get those for you. You didn't have to go to the trouble."

"No trouble! I was hoping we could do a load of laundry together, and wanted to get an early start on the patches." Their voices began to fade as they made their way out of the camper. "I may have to call it an early night tonight. I'm not used to the nocturnal life like you are, mister creature of the night."

"Haha, well, er, I...sorry. I guess you sort of get used to it, um, after a while."

Once he could only hear the murmurs of their voices outside the camper, Worth whirled and punched the closest thing - a dresser in this instance. His arm jerked, muscles and bones complaining from the impact, but he had needed it, the physical pain. He knew that pain, could focus on it and use its familiarity to force everything else out onto the periphery of his consciousness.

Knuckles throbbing, middle one dribbling blood from split skin, he sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the floor.

-A-

The first thing the doctor did when he woke up at noon the next day was find Hanna where he was wandering around downtown, mingling with the locals.

"Oi Hanna," he said, stomping past the downed telephone pole that was being mined for mineral gasoline. "Yer still goin' out today?"

"Uhhhm," Hanna said, "like out where?"

"Ter White Town where th' fuck else."

"You… told me not to go?"

"Yeah but are ya goin'?" Worth answered impatiently.

"…Yes."

"Great," Worth said. "Count me in."

Hanna blinked at him a couple times. Somebody shouted beside them as the powerbox at the end of the telephone pole finally broke open.

"Okay," the redhead finally replied. "But… why?"

"I gotta get outta this goddamn town," Worth said, hunching his shoulders against the wind. "If that means getting' tossed in the clink 'n tortured fer info then y'kin fire up the bronze bull any time ya like."

"I really don't think anything that dramatic is going to—what the heck is a bronze bull?"

Worth snorted. "Y'don't get ter be my age without pickin' up some kina background in medieval torture devices."

"Worth you're not even thirty-nine."

"Too old ter deal with yer natterin', Cross."

Hanna smothered a laugh behind his pale-dry hands. "Yanno," he said, "if you don't like getting old, you've always got the other choice."

"Too late," Worth shrugged. "Got too old ter die young."

"Okay okay," Hanna said, putting his hands up. He grinned. "Fine, we'll both go tonight. We're leaving at five, if everybody can stay on schedule. I'll introduce you to the group later."

"Already got it sorted?" Worth asked, brows going up a little. "Workin' fast today."

"Yeeeeah well," Hanna replied, pausing to breathe hot air into his cupped hands. "I met a lot of people last night so I already had a leg up on the meet'n'greet. So, if that's all? I have this guy waiting on me to show him how a healing rune works, once we get the fuel from this bad boy put away."

Worth frowned vaguely. "Sure, wotever. I'll just go bake a cobbler fer the neighbor ladies 'r summat."

"Dude don't even joke. The last time anyone let you around a kitchen we had to throw out a pound of perfectly good backstrap," Hanna moaned. Personal experience with long bouts of near starvation had made them all a little bit manic about food conservation, but nobody as much as Hanna. The man had actually cried when he dropped a drumstick at Christmas dinner that year.

"Just check into the clinic," Hanna said offhandedly, shrugging his jacket a little tighter. "See if they need a hand."

Worth considered that he had five hours to kill, no one to talk to, and nothing to drink. He went to the clinic where he found one amputee, three fevers, and a botched splinting, and rolled up his sleeves without a word.

Lousy goddamn backwoods hick town with its lousy goddamn backwoods hick doctors.

-A-

Five o'clock came fast. He didn't notice the time until he felt a tap on his shoulder and looked up from his bandaging to find Hanna grinning at him, a blue bandanna tied up around his sweat-tangled curls.

"Busy?"

Doc Worth looked down at the young woman passed out on the examination chair. "Nah," he said. "Some yokels heard the Doc was in and next thing I know I'm up t' my ears in whinging blubber. Been patchin' boo-boos an' passin' out drinks all day. Think this's the last of 'em."

Hanna peered curiously down at the current patient, a pained frown worming its way across his lips. "What was her deal?"

"Sliced herself on a 'chete," Doc Worth replied, absentmindedly, as he sewed up the free edge of the bandages. "Hadda cut off the finger or she'd lose the hand. Won't be shootin' no skeet any time soon, I reckon. Christ I could do fer a steady supply'a antibiotics times like these."

"_Yikes_."

"Yeup. So ya ready ta hit the road 'r what."

"Sure, sure." Hanna picked up a scalpel and then quickly put it down again. "It's just, are you sure you wanna come?"

Worth straightened up and shot Hanna a narrow look, before he got to putting away the medical supplies. "Said I was gonna, din' I?"

"You did, but. You usually hate when I make you go out on super sneaky sneak missions where we don't even kill anybody. You do that sigh thing."

"I don't do no _sigh thing_."

"Yeeeeeah you do. And then you look at me like I told you to go to an alcoholics anonymous meeting or something."

Worth _hrumphed_ and slammed the gauze drawer shut. Since when was wanting to get involved in your buddy's pet project grounds for so much fucking suspicion? Downright ungrateful, it was. So he didn't usually go in for the covert spy games, so what? Maybe he was acquiring a taste.

"Doc," Hanna said, his bright voice sobering. It seemed forever caught at sixteen, tenor and young as the day they met, but when it turned serious in moments like these, you could hear the ghost of nearly three decades passing weigh down on the words. "You're acting weird. Do you want to tell me what's going on?"

"Ain't nothin' goin' on," Worth grunted. The kid couldn't hardly deal with his own issues, and he wanted to get into Worth's too? What a fucking tool.

Hanna sighed. "You know what your problem is?"

"Better'n you do, I bet," the doctor grumbled.

"Your problem is you won't talk to anybody about anything," Hanna persevered, although he did hold the door open for Worth on their way out of the room.

"'m surrounded by fuckin' pots," Worth said, shouldering on his coat as they went. "The only goddamn kettle livin' in pot city an' yer all a buncha racist faggots."

The nurse waved to him as he stalked out the exit, but he hardly looked at her. There was nobody else in the waiting room, so he was done with being interested in this place for the night. Hanna was a couple steps behind him, bouncing on his sneakers trying to keep up.

"Man we don't gotta talk if you don't want to but you know the offer is always open okay?"

"Wotever. Let's get ter real business, eh? Where's yer secret ops squad an' when can we get outta here?"

There was a car in the parking lot, a light framed sedan in some dark shade of tan. At first Worth's attention passed right over it, figuring it had to be a fixture of the concrete left over from years ago, but then on second glance he noticed the new-pumped tires and the too-thin coat of dust, and also the small matter of a person stepping out of it.

Hanna dashed forward and slung an arm around the occupant who had barely managed to extract himself. That occupant was a young man who seemed to not know quite what to do about the overfriendly mage hanging off his shoulder, but he waved a little despite that.

"This dude is my new bro Wesley West."

So-called Wesley gave Worth an uncertain but genuine smile. "It was nice to find somebody with a worse name than mine, finally."

Hanna bent backwards, using West as an anchor, so that his flipped vision was on the pair of figures exiting the sedan behind them. "That's Jay, with the bangin' fro, and you know my man Bartimaeus of course yeah duh."

The zombie gave a little half-salute that didn't look anything other than dead serious. Goddamn undead and their batshit sense of humor. Worse than the bloody British.

"You figured he was goin' out tonight too?" Worth asked him, nodding his head toward Hanna who was already distracted by something inside the vehicle.

"Of course," the dead man replied. His streetlight eyes glittered in the settling light, the same color as the half-obscured sun over his shoulder. "To be honest I think he counts on it."

"Come on!" Hanna shouted from inside the car, banging on the windshield over the steering wheel. "Let's gooooo!"

"Oi," Worth shouted back, "ya little shit, who told ya you could drive?"

The five of them loaded up, and Hanna did not get to drive.

Instead, Hanna blatantly monopolized everything else about the space by jamming an ancient cassette tape of Queen's Greatest Hits into the tape player and explaining at length why he'd selected these two particular men from the town and what particular evaluative abilities they brought to the table. Jay was a former military type. West was a former resident of White Town. Neither of them knew a single Queen song.

The sun was swinging low in its dragging arc when White Town blossomed on the horizon, a bizarrely spindled thing with one blown out building silhouetted perfectly against the deepening blue skyline.

"Those two towers," the dead man hummed from the back seat, leaning forward like a precisely cranked lever. "There's a net between them. That's a moisture collecting technique; I believe it's used in a few places in South America. Ambitious engineering."

"Shit," the military kid said, digging the heel of his palm into his face. "We just about died of thirst last year and you're telling me these sons of bitches had the tech all along?"

"Looks like it."

"We're gonna kick us up a dust cloud," Worth observed, not particularly riveted by the discussion of last year's drinking crisis. "Comin' off the main road, if yer plannin' on takin' us round back where they won't be on the lookout. Provided they ain't spotted us yet, anyhow."

He'd expected an answer from Hanna—not that Hanna was ever much good with detailed foreplanning, the little shit—but what he got was somebody who actually seemed to have spent more than .2 milliseconds considering the possibility.

"We've got our backs to the sun," Jay told him, leaning forward in his seat so he could look past the hunk of green jerky and properly at Worth. Car was crowded as a bonepit and half as breathable. "So nobody's gonna look too hard at us. At a distance we're the same as any other shrubbery, in silhouette. The dust cloud's going to be a problem, but it's not like they got any particular reason to be looking for us. I think if we swing round on the side road that leads to the slaughterhouse we can stay on pavement long enough to minimize dust trail. After that, we park it and go the rest of the way on foot."

"Kee-ryst," Worth muttered, "Ya din' tell me we were takin' a goddamn nature hike, Hanna."

Hanna shrugged in the seat in front of him, not even bothering to turn his head. "You said you wanted to go man, I gave you a chance to back out and everything."

Worth thought about Miriam's sunburnt hands all over his furniture, and then he thought about the throbbing in his lungs that inevitable cross-country running would earn him, and then he kicked the back of Hanna's spacious passenger seat. "Didn't say I wanted out, dumbass."

"You can always, like, guard the car or something, I guess?"

Worth kicked the seat again. "I'm goin' in, Cross, an' I ain't the one who needs worryin' about."

"Yeah, somebody around here sure worries a lot. And it isn't me."

Worth did not deign to dignify that blatantly insinuated slander with a response, and the rest of the drive was a medley of Queen's greatest hits.

-A-

Here is what White Town looked like close up:

Roads were unwalked and overgrown. Signs of fire were faded by a handful of passed seasons, and the high netting structure loomed over the single-story city. The glass in nearly every window had been pried free, giving the whole place a look of uncomfortable hollowness that followed you down every street. The smell of something hot and rancid slipped in and out on the breeze.

Hanna nearly vibrated out of his skin trying to keep from running off down the darkest alley he could find—he'd tempered a little since the big shift, but he still had that god damned loner's gambling instinct. Hephestrion (or whatever his name was tonight) put one gloved hand on the ginger's shoulder, to remind him that there was a team here with him and he had better not get them all killed by being an overeager tool. That wasn't probably how the dead guy would phrase it, but there was a reason why he was doing the reminding and not Worth.

Hanna looked around briefly, motioned for everyone to hold on a minute, and then swung up into a sickly looking tree that was probably never meant to be planted in a desert. Worth wondered for half a second what had become of the potted tree corpse in his old office, and then remembered that he'd burned the whole thing to the ground. Oh well.

Hanna clambered out on a limb high above them, and didn't seem particularly phased by the ominous creaking underneath him. By the time he shimmied down, Worth was starting to calculate how far Hanna could fall before breaking something that would get them all killed.

"Nobody out and about as far as I could get my supervision on," the magician informed them in a cheerful whisper. "But I think there's a light source toward the middle of town. Whatcha think, Doc, sound right for Mrs. Herring's bonfire?"

Worth shrugged. "Know's much as you do," he said, shoving his wind-bitten hands into his pockets. "Lead th'way, master commander."

And Hanna lead the way alright. Even back at the beginning of all this, before Hanna had really had a chance to work his foreplanning muscles or develop his strategic capacity, he'd still had one convincing argument in favor of his leadership: when he ran, you ran after him.

They found nobody most of the whole way through town. Although dark was falling, slowly, the streets were already as still as midnight. Or midnight in a human town anyhow; Salem was easily more active at 3 am than 3 pm.

They paused three times: once for an untied shoe, once for Hanna to examine some kind of hoodoo graffiti slung upside a brick wall, and one last time at the edge of a park where a white light lit up the fringes of the grass. They stopped there, backs to a building across the street,

"I'm gonna go check it out," Hanna murmured, low, in case the sibilants of a whisper might tip off some unseen guardians.

"Fuck ya are," Worth replied shortly. "Ya can't hardly be quiet ter save yer life. Get us all spotted."

"Let me gooo."

"Nah, ya dim git."

"_Worth_!"

The zombie tapped Worth on the shoulder. "Perhaps I should go," he said, pulling the brim of his completely out of place fedora lower over his eyes. "My powers of observation are considerable, and if it's a trap—"

"You don't die easy, awright, that's great, I'm for it."

"Gallahad," Hanna said, "you can't just throw yourself out like—"

The zombie slipped around Worth and up to the front of the line, and put one large gloved hand over Hanna's thin shoulder. "Now is not the time," he said, gently, "but we can discuss it if you like, when we are safely back at home."

And then he turned and broke into an easy stride, blending into the darkness with his usual ungainly grace. Hanna looked back over his shoulder long enough to shoot Worth a murder-dripping glare, then went back to staring at the edge of the park like he could reel his partner back in with sheer willpower alone. Hanna could make a hell of a lot of things happen through willpower alone, but Worth suspected they all underestimated their dead buddy's own willpower more often than not.

Seconds ticked by. No alarms went off. No shouting sounded. After a minute or so, the zombie returned as if he had never left.

"The light originates from a large cauldron mostly submerged in the ground," he reported, tipping his hat up just slightly. "They appear to have cannibalized a playground slide so that it feeds into the cauldron, and its lowest area has been melted off irregularly. There are further lights in the city across the park, which I suspect mark domiciles. The park has been stripped for supplies, it looks like."

"Is the gazebo still there?" West asked, a little wistful.

"No, I'm afraid not. I did find a concrete platform though, which could have been a gazebo at some point. There were some charcoal marks there, I think, although they are quite illegible."

Hanna tapped the wall, his fingers flying with nervous energy as stared at nothing. His lips moved slightly.

"I don't like this," he said, finally. "Worth, what's your gut?"

Worth patted his holstered gun. "Too quiet," he said, "oughta be somebody patrolling, particularly with military types. I vote we pull up roots 'n hit the road."

"Damocles?"

The dead man shook his head just slightly. "I don't like it either. I don't feel anything particularly charged in the air, but that doesn't mean nothing nefarious is being conducted."

"Jay? Wesley?"

"I'd rather get a look at the rest of the town," Wesley said, a nervous buzz at the edge of his voice. "If we can."

The darker man looked torn. "I don't think we've seen enough to get a useful reading," he admitted, "but I also agree with your doctor friend. We're pushing our luck."

Hanna thought about it for a moment.

"Okay," he said at last, "we're gonna fall back a few blocks and shift east—um, which way is east? That way? Okay, sorry, we shift northeast and we try to get past park level without actually moving through the park. After that we break up into teams—Worth, you can go lone ranger or you can tag with one of us, you know, do what you want you never listen to anybody anyway—and we go as far as we can before we see somebody. Turn back and make for the car if you spot a guard or a soldier or whatever."

That wasn't a particularly ingenious plan, but then, none of them had much of a clue what they were up against. It was enough to make Worth think nostalgically about hiding shitty homemade bombs in an alleyway full of garbage for a round of the Most Dangerous Game. At least he'd had all his facts then.

In point of fact, they never did get to find out how that plan would have worked, because during the part where they had just started to move northeast, they ran into a human blockade.

It was about ten strong.

Good old Scarface stood at the head of it, his heavy-booted feet rooted in a linebacker's stance. Behind him, those near-dozen men trained barrels on the intruding company, each dressed in loose green jackets and shaved above the ears. Each almost perfectly still.

"Weeeell," Jackson started, twirling a large knife in what could not be mistaken for anything less than a show of force. The oblong holes in the blade screamed of intimidation, not functionality. "Will you look at what's scuttling around my city, boys. I think we got an infestation on our hands."

Hanna pushed forward, hands up and open, small and redheaded and a damn sight older than his looks let on. Worth could see the snap-fast appraisal in Miguel's eyes. His lip slipped upwards at the corner.

"Whoa," Hanna said, "okay, hold up! Totally here to just talk!"

Miguel twirled the knife again. "_Talk_ doesn't usually come along with a golem… or their daddy, kid."

"Okay uhhhh actually I'm not sure which one is supposed to be my dad or the golem, but either way you are super mega wrong like wow with like, everything you just said. For the record, I'm almost thirty, okay?"

Amused laughter pattered from Jackson and rolled through the ranks of guards behind him like dominoes in a line. "Fine. We'll go with that. You wanna explain Mr. Blonde and Mr. Green, then?"

Hanna shifted his feet. This was ground where he knew how to stand. "They're my best bros, well, uh, except for Conrad. He's also a best bro, but he is ultra violet challenged and not available to come hang and stuff. So it's us and zombie, not golem, and no, he isn't going to try to eat your brains."

Beside Worth, the dead man tipped his hat. "I prefer still beating hearts."

Jackson's eyes narrowed, the thickened skin of scar puckering.

"That was a joke."

"Uh huh."

"Yeah! So!" Hanna cut in, "Hey! We were all like, up in the area and what not and wanted to maybe, y'know, get to know you guys and stuff? Is that cool?" Hanna's perpetual grin took on a slightly pained look. "Please?"

Jackson smiled. Worth didn't like it. A smile should lighten the eyes, not harden them. "Well, sure. Hospitality nearly demands I offer you some lemonade, doesn't it?"

"Lemonade would be boss, actually. Or uh, apple cider? Hot? Maybe kinda sorta do you have that by chance? I like, totally did not expect winter to be so cold 'cause like, bro? Arizona? Desert? Sand, and lizards, and cacti, oh my."

Miguel's smile remained, but his eyes slitted. "No lemonade. No apple cider. But since we're all friends here—ain't that right, boys?" Behind him, that toothy, wolf grin had spread through the small militia. After a few moments, Jackson's back stiffened. "Don't think I heard you, men."

"Sir, yes sir!"

"And there we go. Gotta keep some order or else civil behavior goes right down the tubes, doesn't it, now? So since we're all friends here, I expect you're looking for a grand tour. Want to see how we run our operation."

Worth grit his teeth. Son of a bitch used more goddamn rhetorical questions than a ninety-year-old politician. If Conrad had been there, they'd never have hear the end of it.

From the strained set of Hanna's shoulders, he was feeling the rhetorical bludgeoning too. "Uh, sure? I mean, that'd be rad."

"I'm afraid I can't do that. Letting outsiders in on our top secret methods?" Jackson tsked, and it wasn't the first time in Worth's life that he felt awfully like a mouse being batted between massive cat paws. "That's just askin' for trouble, isn't it?"

"Is it, though?" Hanna asked, tilting his head. "I mean, look, I'll level with you, we're not really the farming types or really all that great at like, building buildings. Good at destroying them, even though that's usually by accident, but we have other skills, and, man, all we really want to know is how to form a truce between you guys and Mad Herring-an and her crew."

"Oh," Jackson sighed, half melodramatic pantomime and half blatant mockery, "but you see, we had one. We had a great partnership going. We were really giving quite a bit more than we were taking of course, generous of us, y'know how we smalltown boys like to take care of our own."

The toothy grin broke again like a bone punching up through skin, and Worth wanted to knock the teeth right out of Jackson's skull. Instead he did his best to use the sluggish chug of weary adrenaline trickling through his veins to sharpen his other senses. Keep an eye on that one on the left. Bad trigger discipline. Idiot was likely to shoot his own foot off if anything made him jump.

"That's super radtastic of you," Hanna was saying, "no foolin'. It's hard to find people who are willing to help their fellow man or non-human these days, I will grant you that. But the thing is that um...well, no one is really telling us outright what's going on or what the whole contractual treaty sort of doodad thingamabob is and I've had enough people giving me the run around and talked to enough demons to know that there are usually pretty nasty reasons for omission of information. Kay? Level with me, bro. 'Cause I'll level with you. I have a feeling I know what's going on here based on what I do know and what no one will say and it is not giving me the fuzzy wuzzies."

Jackson's shoulders shrugged, lips hiding his teeth. What was his weakness? Everyone had them. Exploit them to your advantage. Worth was pretty sure he could tell Jackson's, and he was tired enough of how things were dragging out that he was ready to play the hand he thought he'd been dealt. "Ain't nothin' ter know, Hanna. We seen enough."

"Huh-wha?" Blue eyes blinked behind thick glasses, obscured slightly by a haze of desert dust.

Worth, for the first time, took his hand off of the pistol drooping heavy in his hip holster. "Jus' merceneries. Betcha it's jus' them raidin' other towns in th' middle a th' night. Ain't nothin' here worth our time. Pro'lly usin' th' townsfolk as slave labor in their fancy mayorship houses."

"Slave labor?" Hanna repeated, mouth twisting. "Gross. Slavery is just...it's super gross. Man, you really think that's what's going on here?" There was a tilt in Hanna's head and shoulders that Worth hoped meant he knew what they were getting at. "Lame-o and gross."

"Yeah. Ain't no point in stickin' 'round goddamn slavers 'n' raiders."

Jackson made a disgusted sound. "Slave trade? Raiding? Please, you really think we're some unsophisticated backwoods militia?"

"Wot? Like ye ain't? Ya got a run down lookin' town with a buncha blokes wanderin' 'round wavin' their guns like they're dicks. Ain't no crops. Ain't no livestock. Ain't nothin' here we aint' seen a hundred times b'fore."

"I sincerely doubt that." The grin was gone. Worth tried not to smile himself.

"I...dunno. I kinda think you might be right here. Herring seemed to think that there was something to worry about but...yeah, I don't see anything plenty of night watches and extra bullets can't take care of. Okay," he sighed and smiled, waving at Jackson, "well, thanks anyway, man! Uh, good luck with things? Hopefully less slaving and raiding though 'cause, lame gross. Karma, man. Maybe we can teach some of the townsfolk a few runes to guard against home invasions? Alarms or something."

"Home invasions? Runes?" Jackson's upper lip curled derisively. Motherfuckin' bingo. "Amateur bullshit. We trade and we do it honestly. We take so little and give so much in return. We have been benevolent this entire time, entirely fair, and our methods are so much more fucking sophisticated and powerful than _runes_."

"Runes are pretty rad. Don't knock 'em."

"Right. Runes." Jackson snorted. "I've seen runes. They're _oh so powerful_ until a wrong step drags away the salt or a splash of water erases chalk on the wall. You want real power?" He reached into his button down shirt, yanking out a small, stained fabric pouch hanging from his neck. "Then you deal with the powerful."

Hanna's back stiffened and Worth felt his own shoulders tighten. Even the zombie seemed to draw himself up a bit.

"That's a gris gris bag. Whyyyyyyyy do you need one of those, exactly?"

"This is my little bit of insurance."

Worth's eyes shifted again, gaze slipping from one man's neck to another. He hadn't noticed before, but there appeared to be slight lumps in the same spot under each man's shirt. They were all in on whatever this was, and whatever this was, it probably wasn't good. "So ya got yerself a fancy necklace. Big whoop. Them bags're useless fer offensive magic an' they smell like shitty popourri. What, 're we s'pposed ter cower in fear cause ya got a decent fence too?"

"Oh, but they're not the war machine. They're only the controls."

Hanna snapped up straight. "Whoaaaaaaaaaa uhhhhhhh. Whoa. Okay, no. You're summoning demons? You can't do that - I mean, you can, like, it is possible, but it is really not a good idea because they do not play nice."

"They do when they're paid properly for their services."

There was a bit of crackling electricity that Worth could feel emanating off of Hanna's small form. It reminded him of the plasma globe at a science museum he'd been to as a kid. A strange buzzing sort of feel just inside your bones and under your skin.

"Dude. No. Those bags are not going to protect you, no matter how often you charge them or what you charge them with."

"They will. I've met one. He showed me the way, the ingredients. How the fuck do you think I survived getting separated from my squadmates out in the godforsaken Afghanistan desert? It sure as hell wasn't by survival training."

"Oh." Hanna breathed. "No. Dude. Dude, you're not just dealing in demons. You're making deals with djinn, aren't you?"

"Of sorts." The pride was still there, still more potent than any truth serum. Jackson slipped the grisgris bag back under his shirt. "I made a deal with the first. He showed up at night. Two of us were still alive, me and Walker. Walker was injured and so was I. But there was no way Walker was going to make it, not with his injuries. I might, but I only had a little bit of water on me and my face wouldn't stop bleeding. The chances of a rescue party showing up in time were pretty much null. I thought it was a stray dog at first, wondered why the hell a dog was in the desert. Till it talked to me. Then I thought I was hallucinating."

"But he made you a deal, didn't he?"

"You're damn right he did. Walker was going to die, anyway, you know. I just helped him on his way."

"You sacrificed him to the djinn."

"Yeah." Jackson shrugged. "I did. I could live or I could die, and I chose to fucking live. He told me how to make the bags, gave me supplies, told me I could call on him or others anytime I needed anything."

The reason for the disappearing townsfolk was plenty obvious now.

"You can't do that."

"I can. I do. I will."

"It is going to back fire and you are sacrificing people. You are _sacrificing people_!"

"One for the many!"

"How long till the many become one? What then? This is wrong, this is wrong on every level, and you are going to _stop_."

"No. I'm not stoppin'."

"Yeah, you are. Because I'm stopping you."

"What? Here? Now? Not sure if you noticed, but you may be slightly outgunned at the moment."

"No. Not now. We have a treaty with the fey and other non-human entities. This treaty covers all of North America, and it has specific terms for dealing with violations. You are so massively in violation I can't even begin to tell you what you'll need to do to pay for your crimes, but you deserve a chance. Everyone deserves a chance. I will contact the council. You have twenty-four hours to send word to us that you are going to turn yourselves in."

The Cheshire Cat had nothing on good old Mr. Jackson. "And what if I don't?"

"I will stop you. By any means necessary. Don't force my hand."

"Shaking in my boots, I assure you. I promise you this, little soldier boy. The next time you come through, I'll have a little lemonade waiting."

Hanna didn't reply with words. He was too busy digging his nails into his palms. "Twenty-four hours," he grit out.

He took a step back, falling into the gap between Worth and the zombie and their quietly aimed pistols, and then turned his back. It was a strange kind of Mexican standoff: outnumbered, but still just as dangerous as the opposition. When Hanna's footsteps had quieted down the length of the street, Jay and West turned and followed him, and then finally Worth and his undead associate began to make their way back, towards the bloody light in the western blocks of the city.

No shots were fired.

They walked in silence, returning to the borrowed car. Worth buttoned up his jacket against the evening wind, and ignored the bewildered looks West was trying to send him. At the edge of town, they found the sedan in perfect operating condition, untouched, and slipped warily inside.

By some unspoken treaty, the zombie sat in the driver's seat and Worth took up residence in the passenger's seat. It seemed—hard to explain but—as if being too close to familiar faces might drive Hanna deeper into himself. As the zombie started the ignition, Freddie Mercury began to serenade them through the speakers once more. It was short lived, however, as Hanna reached between the two front seats to eject the tape. It was a strangely quiet drive back to town.

-TBC-


	3. Chapter 3

_Facing the Bullets_

Holy shit this is so long I really hope you guys like it, I'm sorry there's so much exposition at the beginning, I can't believe I spent so much time changing the order around but NOW I HAVE IT RIGHT. Thanks to Vaysh for writing the lovers quarrel with me, and for pitching in on the lion scene despite being on a Metal Gear kick.

* * *

There's a dozen reasons in this gun.

-"Demolition Lovers"

_Nearly Three Years After_

_Arizona_

There was a town hall. Obviously, there was going to be a town hall. They got back to town at seven and the first thing Hanna did was send word out that there was going to be a meeting at nine, grabbing shoulders and nodding pointedly and generally making it feel like an ominous but resolute storm had blown into town on the dust at their heels.

In the mean time, the energy behind getting multiple tons of automobile pushed into something resembling a wall had ratcheted up to frantic, mothers and teenagers pitching in for the first time in a jittery blur that went on and on around Worth as he made his way towards the RV. He didn't figure he was going to get much in the way of quiet for the next day or two, so he might as well grab what he could while he could. Knowing Hanna, he probably didn't have any plan to speak of.

But he was going to need one, of sorts, and that was going to be the noisy part.

After maybe ten minutes of uninterrupted work, the door to the Herring guest bedroom slammed open and shut behind Conrad. Slammed doors weren't exactly unusual around the vampire. Worth didn't even look up from where he was sitting on the bed, running a bore snake saturated with Hoppe's gun oil through his rifle. Clean it every time you use it, or at least every time you think about it. He would have run out of the oil if he pulled a cleaning strip through the barrel each time he got in a gun fight.

"What _exactly_ is your problem?" Conrad said, with the aggressive sort of huff-snort that made Worth think of cartoon bulls blowing out steam. You couldn't hardly take the vampire seriously even when he did his damndest to look intimidating, and that was just typical half-cocked Conrad for you wasn't it?

"I gotta narrow it down ter one thing?"

There had been a rifle and a bore snake in his hands. Now there was just air and the hot pain of rugburn on his palm. He glared murder at Conrad, who was glaring it right back at him and dropping the rifle and bore snake to the ground. Messing with a man was one thing. Messing with his firearm was something else. Worth stood, spine stiff as his upper lip, as he used every inch of his height to tower over Conrad.

Conrad was not backing down. "_You_. You think you're off the hook for harassing Miriam last night? You have been nothing but a rude piece of shit ever since we got here. So what the fuck is your _problem_?"

"Yannow, maybe ya shouldn't ask me. Mebbe ya oughter ask someone else. Sure seem happy as hell ter do that lately."

The reply was flat, though Conrad's nostrils were flaring. "What."

"Ya heard me. G'on. Run off. Talk ter yer best gal pal. Why not? 's all ya been doin' since we got here. Jus' you an' her all cozied up all fuckin' day an' night."

Thoughts were running behind Conrad's eyes like a film on a projector screen, and a white, sharp ended finger stabbed into Worth's sternum. "Oh fuck you. That's what this is about? Some kind of a cockblock? _Don't you even dare_. I am not letting you do that to her."

"Do wot, _exactly_?" he responded, nasal and mocking.

"She doesn't need you trying to fuck her like you try to fuck everything else on two legs. She doesn't deserve that, and I am not about to let you do it."

"Her? Fuck _her_?" Worth's laugh was high, loud, and over pronounced as he felt blood pressure spiking, rushing through his veins. "Ya couldn't pay me enough ter touch her."

"What?" This time Conrad sounded honestly surprised, but more than that, he sounded insulted. "You're really trying to say this isn't about you wanting to have sex with her?"

"Ya even bothered ter look at her? Ugly's fuck. Ignorin' th' nose which," he leaned a little closer with a sneer, "is _real_ damn hard, she's got hips like a rhino and sure as hell ain't got th' sort a rack ter make up fer it. Arms're too bulky, feet 're like goddamned horse hooves."

Steam was rising from under Conrad's shirt, ears and limbs elongating ever so slightly. "Oh, yes, oh of _course_. How utterly stupid of me to think you might care about a person and not what they look like. And fuck you, by the way. She has a lovely, classical body."

"Well why don't ya jus' draw some pretty li'l pictures of her then? Hmm? If she's s'damn _lovely_."

"Give me something to draw with and I would fucking _love_ to. Not just because her shape is appealing, but because she's beautiful both outside and in, which," he snarled, "is way fucking more than I could ever say for some other people I've had the extreme misfortune of being forced to share space with."

"Oh yeah, yer life's just a fuckin' sob story, boohoo."

A darkening, cloudier shade was taking over Conrad's eyes, making the red of iris all that more startling. "I would give anything to be rid of this side show spectacle of a group I've been stuck with for the past four years!"

Something that had been twisted up and cracking inside Worth finally broke. He didn't know what, and he didn't want to examine it. He couldn't examine it, not now, not here.

"Fine! Why don't ya, then? Worthless piece of shit. We always gotta fend fer ya, always gotta cover yer ass. Why don't ya jus' stay here, then, hmm? Have your fancy li'l white picket fence with your fat cow wife and live yer faggot happy life, Doris Day?"

"Oh wouldn't you love it if I did!"

"Make my life a motherfucking cake walk, it would!" Worth shouted. "Three years I've been cleanin' up yer messes an' wipin' yer ass fer ya, y'ungrateful little bitch, when I coulda been doin' something useful with my time! We'd all be in a _god damn better place_ if you'd had the fucking decency to croak properly when the bitch first killed ya!"

"_What_."

"You heard me. Blood bank's closed, Conrad. Go fuck off an' have yerself a wonderful life. We're better off without ya."

And then it was Worth's turn to slam the door this time, shoving Conrad out of the way and storming out into the bitterly cold night.

-A-

The dead guy came and got Worth just before nine. Considering he was just lurking around the park and glaring at children, it was probably impressive he'd been found at all, or something. Then again, everybody seemed to know just where to find Worth tonight, at exactly the times when he didn't want to be found.

The zombie didn't ask. He could probably tell, anyhow.

Mostly, Worth was happy to throw himself into some kind of task, even if it was menial politician shit that he couldn't have picked his own way through with a road map.

Town hall was pretty podunk all things considered. Best anybody had been able to tally, there were about three thousand people left in the city and that was with a fair sized chunk of the previous inhabitants of White Town added in. Ruling out children and babysitters, you were still up around a thousands. When the first fist fight started over available chairs in the auditorium, Worth was decidedly unsurprised.

Hanna left to go mediate . Hanna came back with a bloody nose.

They eventually did manage to get the clusterfuck straightened out, which was shitty timing since Worth had been trying to edge his way over to the melee for a while now and he only finally managed to get out from under Hanna's line of sight at about the same time they got all the major participants in various headlocks. Christ, what did a guy have to do to get involved in a low level civil disturbance these days? The second they got out of this town, Worth was heading back to Salem and finding a bar.

Hanna hopped up on the stage

"Look, I don't have a microphone so if everybody can try to be really quiet while I'm talking that would be super helpful!"

A vaguely resentful murmur fizzled out into mostly silence. Towards the very back, people were repeating the order to the crowd seated behind them.

"So," Hanna started, with his naturally tenor voice pitched to carry, "this is just to give you guys a rundown of the situation. Most of you probably already heard by now, but I guess some of you have like, lives of your own, and maybe you haven't heard yet? Um. Me and some guys went into White Town earlier today. Tonight? Anyway, we made contact with the leader of the faction, who some of you guys might recognize. His, uh, his name's Miguel Jackson?"

A wave of white noise washed over the auditorium as people whispered to their neighbors—Worth assumed they were telling the same story Herring had told him, but one girl in the front row was making the kind of revolted faced that girls usually make when they see dead animals. He guessed Miguel must have had a couple stories to his name Herring either didn't know or hadn't felt the need to share.

"Yeah!" Hanna said, clapping his hands together anxiously. "There's that. Miguel's operation looks like it's smaller than us but it's a lot better armed. They've got plenty of regular weapons and also they've got some big nasty magic in the bunker sooo…"

Worth wondered, for a moment, why Hanna wasn't just telling them about the Djinn contracts. And then he remember that this was the same kid who wouldn't even tell his doctor the full story behind his giant sliced open chest, and ultimately chalked it up to Hanna's bizarre sense of _need to know basis_.

"We have to be protected," Hanna went on. "These aren't trustworthy guys, you know? If they, like, launch a bomb at us in the middle of the night we're gonna wanna have some protection or something. I already put up some rudimentary shielding against hexes and curses and, uh, miscellaneous bad mojo, but it's a long way from impenetrable and it only covers distance magic which is…"

The zombie gently nudged him in the ribs.

"Right," Hanna winced, "Never mind, sorry, I'll save the lecture. The point is, they've got cars and guns and things so Havel, Rebecca Havel? You out there? If you could maybe put up your hand!"

A number of rows into the audience, a hand went up.

"Great! The most important thing we gotta do is get that car wall finished. How close to done are we?"

There was a muffled reply, and then a guy a row or two closer shouted, "She says we'll be done by noon tomorrow! …If everybody pitches in!"

"Awesome," Hanna breathed. "Okay so I'd like it a lot if everybody who isn't busy with some other task could help finish up Project Trojan Wall which is a pretty cool name I think I'll keep using it. Remember that's there's more jobs than just pushing vehicles, there's also looking for keys and steering and running for water I guess? Also I think Janet Iovitch—hey Janet! Was working on barbed wire patches and so on so if anybody wants to help her out, please and thank you!"

"I still don't understand," someone started, then cleared their throat and tried again louder, "I still don't understand why we're not just launching the first strike on these bastards! I'd volunteer!"

There was a smattering of agreements with some swearing mixed in. Worth was already squeezing his temples aggressively before Hanna even opened his mouth to reply, because there was no way he'd be smart enough not to mention—

"Well I promised them twenty-four hours," Hanna admitted, rocking back on his heels. "To think it over and maybe make peace? Or like, stage a coup or something lucky and well timed like that."

"Why?" someone else shouted, sharp and impatient.

"Because," the magician replied, "we don't know what their story is. We don't even really know what they want. They might decide that it's not worth it to launch any kind of attack, or they don't have enough free men to mobilize, or… heck, just about anything. But if we fire the first shot it's gonna be like _aw no you didn't_ and then we're guaranteed to have a fight on our hands even if they weren't really gonna do anything otherwise."

Worth let out a breath.

"So yeah! Also I'd rather not let anybody get killed if I can avoid it. We definitely need to get rolling with the defensive perimeter though, and I want you guys to be ready if they do decide to try something nasty in the next couple of days."

"How ready are we talking?" a woman in the front row asked. Squinting, Worth thought he could make out the face of the same woman who had met them in a bathrobe the first night.

"Weeeeell," Hanna said, twirling his hands vaguely, "you need to be physically insulated, and in the longer run you need to be self sufficient so getting the planting business on is a health and safety thing for sure, but you also need some kind of like, chain of command, for emergencies? And a nightwatch."

"What about getting armed?" the woman demanded. "What if we have to go on offensive?"

"I'm not gonna let it get to that if I can help it."

"But what if you can't?"

Like a shadow drifting across the stage, the zombie cut through the middle of the conversation and bent at the knees just before the edge of the stage. He extended one gloved hand, and pulled Bathrobe Girl up onto the platform.

"You were saying," he murmured.

She paused, a little unnerved, and then gave him something like a grateful nod. "I was saying," she said, turning her attention back to Hanna, who she towered over, "what if you and your friends can't protect us. It's not that I don't believe you've got some tricks up your sleeve or whatever, but I'm not happy about putting the safety of my entire town in the hands of four strangers with an RV. There are some people here—"

She looked pointedly aside, toward the assembly.

"—Who'd like to blame you for the White Town aggression. They think we were fine until you showed up and stirred things around. But me and my family are aware that this was a long time in coming, and we're with you. We know you're the only chance we have at holding our own against whatever satanic voodoo shit's going on next door. But Mr. Cross, you're just one man."

"Mrs. Uh, Gordon? Okay yeah, Mrs. Gordon, we can do a lot with just a handful of people, I promise you!"

Gordon snorted. "Sure."

"And the plan is to avoid direct skirmishing if at all possible—"

"But what if it's _not_ possible," Gordon insisted, planning her hands on her hips. "You're telling me things always go off without a hitch for you? Let us protect ourselves."

Hanna rubbed at his forehead. "Look, I'm trying not to come off as patronizing here, but you do _not_ understand what you're volunteering for. Miguel has powers like you wouldn't even believe. I can't in good conscience ask any of you to put yourselves in danger like this."

"You're not asking," Gordon snapped, "we're demanding."

"If you don't participate," Hanna explained through gritted teeth, "there's still a chance that you can surrender peacefully if things go south. We play scapegoat, your city keeps surviving. The most important thing we can possibly do here is make sure that your kids don't grow up orphans."

"With all _due_ respect," Gordon replied, pointedly looking over the length of Hanna's civilian getup right down to his battered marker-stained converses, "we have the right to decide if we want to run that risk or not."

"And I have the right not to arm you if I think I can save your lives some other way!"

"Put it this way: you're leaving us someday. Probably some day soon. Are you going to leave us defenseless when you go? We're asking you to give us the tools to protect ourselves. It's a big damn world out there, and I've got a toddler to think about. There's magic out there, right? Someday when you've been gone a year or ten years or twenty, what if we've got to protect ourselves from something that bullets don't kill."

Hanna stood there for a long moment, his eyes far away like stars half hidden behind dark clouds. Maybe he was remembering the hollow ribcages of all the thousand cities left empty by the ravages of plague, or maybe the streetfires in the heart of New York City. Maybe he was imagining some far flung future where he would be remembered as the man who made the bomb possible, the awful specter of another project Manhattan hung up on his already dragging conscience. Worth couldn't say which one it was, but the result was the same.

Gordon reached out and put a hand on his arm. "Please," she said, "we deserve the chance."

Hanna looked away, and then his shoulders locked like Atlas ready to take up the globe. "Alright," he sighed. He took a step forward and spoke to the muttering audience. "We are definitely not instituting a friggin draft or anything, but. If. If any of you want to learn how to defend yourselves against supernatural stuff… if you learn, I'm gonna expect you to use it to protect each other, okay? That's the deal. That's the only way I'm doing this. You gotta swear to me you'll only use it for times like these."

The murmur rose and fell like a wave.

"Not everybody is going to have the talent for this," Hanna said, breathing like he was about to take a jump off the high dive. "Class starts at eight o'clock tomorrow morning. We'll start simple, with stuff even, like, Worth can do."

Worth scowled at him, but Hanna was a long way off—too far right now to be paying attention to people standing a few feet away.

"First we'll do self protection, then we'll do healing, and then… then I've got some ideas about how to deal with Djinn. It's gonna be full-on World War II day, I expect everybody to pitch in as much as they possibly can." He turned back to Gordon, who was still standing there behind him with her brown hair pulled up in that tennis-player's ponytail. "I hope you know what you've just signed yourself up for. Miguel isn't gonna have a lot of mercy ready for people who spit in his face."

"Live free or die," Gordon quipped, and briefly saluted before jumping off the stage into the milling crowd. There was going to be a while yet for the meeting, while people sorted out some kind of chain of command, and there was a pretty likely chance that another fight would break out before the night was over, but Hanna wasn't showing any signs of sticking around for it.

Hanna sighed. "Come on, guys, I think I'm gonna turn in early for once."

-A-

Somewhere in the middle of the night, snow had started to fall. Snow fell on the desert, sand and snowflakes, and the sky was white and gray when Worth woke up. He'd fallen asleep in the heart of the RV, crumpled painfully into the booth underneath the window. He must have pulled away the blackout curtains that morning, in the darkness when he settled down to wait out the empty hours of the dawning day. Couldn't remember. They hadn't had a proper meal yesterday, too much to do, and the world was blurring a bit at the edges.

There were ghosts awake with him, ghosts of things he'd always known were coming. And damn, but they were coming. He'd felt it starting the moment that dim bitch opened her mouth.

Outside the window, white and gray and blue and far away yellowish stone stood stark and straight like a photograph of a place he'd never seen. Christ, you'd think he'd have seen it all by now.

Not snow, though. Not in a desert. Not even sure if that was something that should happen.

There was a faint noise from the bench that had become Hanna's bed in the last year-and-a-half. It was piled up with blankets and pillows, four inches thick, and the redhead lay curled, sunken into the middle of it like a stone embedded in concrete. Worth couldn't remember how he'd been convinced to let the kid do that. It seemed like too long ago to bear remembering. He wondered vaguely why Hanna was sleeping out here, in the RV, when a warm house was waiting for him just across the lawn.

Probably some kind of self-flagellation, if he knew Hanna, which he did. The thought just made him feel tired.

Worth had figured he was past his expiration for a long time now, but this morning, in the snow and sand and faint, not-quite-sunlight, Worth felt honestly, truly _old_ for the first time in his life. He could feel it in the sunburned mesh of his skin, in the blue tunneling veins.

There was no sound from the bedroom at the back. Obviously. The sun was coming out, somewhere, and the metal bones of the thing they called a home still rattled with shouts from the night before.

Worth closed his eyes. They had plans for the day, and he was tired to the bone.

Sleep returned easily, for once.

-A-

Doc Worth was getting old enough that he probably would have slept in past noon if something loud and smoky hadn't exploded on the front lawn and sent him swearing in a tumble to the floor beside his make-shift bed. Blearily, he glanced over at the bench just long enough to be sure that Hanna was long gone.

Well that put the odds of it being a science experiment just a little over the odds of it being a surprise bombing. Worth shrugged his jacket on over the ratty shirt he figured was close enough to pajamas and made his stumbling way over to the window. Huh. Sunlight in the morning. What a goddamn novelty it would be, if great grey elephantine tons of clouds weren't blocking out the sun this particular morning.

"Oi," he shouted at the nearest living thing, which happened to be a teenager, "we got a motherfuckin' Pearl Harbor on our hands or did I just get a early mornin' Hanna'gram?"

The kid gave him a look like she'd really rather bolt than answer the question, but she did manage to shout back, "Mr. Cross had to leave before he could tell us how to turn the magic off!"

"Typical," Worth mumbled, shutting the window, "teach 'em how ter peddle an' ferget ter tell 'em where the brakes are."

The clock on the mantle said11:40 AM when Worth left the RV, in a pisspoor mood and ready to tear somebody a new one. He would have gone back to sleep, except for that ugly nagging twist in the back of his head that had kept him alive more times than not. Today was the day. Better not to sleep through any more of it.

He found Hanna further in town, situated on the hard-weathered pagoda at the center of the park. Dozens of people were scattered around the step, uncapped markers wiggling in the faint daylight. The whole area smelled vaguely of permanent ink.

"—It's incendiary," Hanna was saying, "so it's all about putting energy into the system. You'd need less energy if the material was naturally flammable, but that would also make it easier to put out—"

Worth paused under a tree and watched the lesson for a while, the thunderhead of his terrible mood dissipating a little. He figured he'd probably missed the healing lesson at this point, which was kind of a shame. He'd tried to get the hang of that rune before, but he only ever ended up frustrated and swearing at Hanna.

After maybe a quarter of an hour spent on that lesson, the magician stood up, stretched, and made is way over to the tree where Worth was standing.

"Just woke up?" Hanna asked, capping his pen with a quick snapping motion.

Worth grunted. "See ya got the fac'try floor runnin' on the war effort here."

Hanna winced a little. "I was going to make them myself, but…"

He didn't need to finish. They both knew what happened when Hanna tried to stock an armory all by himself, and as far as Worth was concerned it was nearly a goddamn miracle he wasn't trying to do it again.

"We're gonna need ya if they try anythin'," Worth said, as close to verbal approval as he was willing to get that morning.

"Yeah," Hanna sighed. "Anyhow, when I get done with this, the townspeople worked out some kind of chain of command and they want us to hold a meeting. More details stuff, I guess? Anyways, you should come if you're not doing anything else. Since we're a team and all, right?"

"Wotever. The clinic can do without me fer another hour."

"Oh, no, you should go there now 'cause I'm gonna be out here working for a while. I already had to put out one guy who was on fire earlier this morning—man, I remember the first time I did that, we didn't have any water so I had to jump in a dumpster to—yeah okay, that is probably not the best story to be telling right now? The point is, I better stick around to supervise."

"Lookit you, some kinda respectable adult."

For a second, Hanna lit up so brightly that the whole sky looked like nighttime. It was almost blinding, and for that moment, Worth had no idea what to say.

After a pause, he tilted his chin upward. "What's the deal with the snow'n shit, then?"

"Oh," Hanna replied, less happy now. "Well, it's not like… meteorologically impossible or whatever but. I think it's a bad sign. You know one of the signs you've got Fairies hanging around is mixed up seasons?"

Worth didn't know that, of course, but he shrugged anyways.

Hanna pointed upwards. "I think something kinda… reality warpy just stepped onto the playing field."

One guess what that might be, sure. Worth figured that was enough for him, so he ducked on out and let Hanna get back to his junior professor routine. The clinic could probably do with someone shouting at it for a couple hours if it was going to be crisis-ready in time for anything of a crisis type nature, and Worth was more than willing to be the guy shouting at it. Besides which, these dumb hicks didn't know when to leave well enough alone, and he was guessing a couple guys around town had probably pulled their stitches by now, so—

A pale figure came around the corner, walking under the vague shadow of a burnt-out gift-shop's awning.

"Connie?" Worth said, squinting. What were the probabilities that he was dreaming again? The ultra-vivid nighttime excursions had gotten rarer after he torched Lamont, but even those were never this mundane. Goddamn stupid dream if it was one, which wasn't looking likely.

Across the street, the vampire tucked his shoulders up around his neck and didn't stop moving."Doctor," he grunted.

Worth glanced up at the sky. Well, he'd seen Conrad come out during thunder storms. This wasn't _too_ different—except that those were usually late in the afternoon, when the sun wasn't so bloody high.

"It's goddamn mid-day," Worth snapped, "what're y'doin' outside?"

"I don't see what business of _yours_ it is," Conrad sniffed. There was a faint pink flush on his cheeks that spoke more of ambient sunburn than embarrassment.

"Wha', yer goin' fer the world record most roundabout suicide attempt?"

"You give yourself too much credit," Conrad replied, and promptly walked away.

That was it. No argument, no screaming, no blows—just Conrad walking away, once-expensive shoes kicking up powdery clouds of snow still unmelted in the shadows.

Worth had trouble remembering what he'd set out to do, after that.

-A-

Town Hall that day wasn't actually being held in the Hall proper this time. Instead, since they'd streamlined it down to single representatives from most of the households that were willing to get their hands dirty with Hanna's brand of community service, they holed up in a conference room on the second story where the floor was like ice but someone sitting beside the window could easily make out the distinct shadow of White Town flickering in the distance.

Conrad was already there, settled peevishly in a chair at the front corner of the room. Worth pointedly slammed himself down into a seat at the far end of the table and kicked his feet up on the polished wood. He turned his attention towards the spasm of redheaded motion front and center of the room, just a few feet to the vampire's left.

Hanna crackled with nervous energy.

Standing at the head of the table, ice-blue eyes wide and skittering, he looked like something wild shivering at the doors of its cage, waiting for the zookeeper to pull out his key. Everyone was seated, now, and that was as much go-ahead as Hanna needed to launch right into it, picking up from some quieter side conversation that Worth must have missed.

"Patroclus looked it up. They're violating the codes," he said, in a voice cracked with so much meaning that the meaning itself was indiscernible. "Clause numero uno, self defense, and that gives us jurisdiction."

In his corner, legs crossed in his curved chair, Conrad scowled dangerously. No one who hadn't seen him in his darkest moments would have recognized it for what it was, but three of them in that room knew. That was fear.

"Are you positive?" he demanded, ignoring the men and women around the room who looked at him with varying degrees of trepidation. "This is incredibly, _incredibly_ dangerous, and I don't want to risk my pisspoor semblance of a life just to have the council haul us in for some kind of obscure execution sentence."

"Connie," Hanna replied, looking preoccupied, "I practically _wrote_ that treaty, and we've enforced it for _how_ long now? You seriously think I don't know where our jurisdiction ends?"

Worth watched them silently. Hanna was older. Hanna had to be older—everyone gets older, even immortals, even people like Hanna—but somehow Worth had known it all this time without really believing it. It was only now, in cold florescent light, that he realized for the first time in all this time that they were _all_ getting older and thinner and colder, somehow. He'd felt it coming, sitting in that goddamn park like an overgrown kindergartener last night. The world had turned not gradually, this time, but in a sudden fit and start.

"I just want to be sure. God knows this isn't going to be easy as it is."

"Trust me, Con-man. This is serious. This is not within their parameters. War by proxy is covered in cases like..."

And then he rattled off some pseudo legal speak that Worth could not have been less interested in if he was paid to give the least amount of attention possible. The gist was that they could legally kill djinni—as if they had the firepower for that anyways—as long as the djinni were subcontracted to blahdyblahblah.

"Of course it's not like we can do much damage to a djinn anyways," Hanna said, apparently reading his mind. "I mean I can whip us up some water-based mojo so it's not like we're sitting ducks or anything, but…"

Hanna hopped up onto the table between two surprised townspeople, settling in for a lecture. Worth suspected he did that more to calm himself down than to help anybody understand anything, draining off the storm of anxiety into the forward-plowing motion of a lesson.

"What you gotta understand," he explained, "is Djinni are in a whole different league. Fey are magic—they live basically forever unless you kill them, they can heal and get up in your head and pretty much do anything I can do with runes only by just instinct, so like, fey are magic. Right. But Djinni, they can _do _things. Time and space are like, fuck naw, we're not messing with those guys. Djinn wants to be in Paris at five and China at five-fifteen? They can do that. If a fairy wants to spontaneously make a plant grow, they have to find a spot that already had a seed planted in it. A djinn doesn't have to do that. They just… make it so."

Conrad leaned forward. "Hanna, you can't expect us to fight something like that."

"Weeeeell… Miguel's djinn is gonna be tied down by the summoning so that puts us on like… slightly more even footing? Kilimanjaro versus Everest type stuff. But like I said, I can make us some stuff that'll hold it off so we can focus on the people instead."

"And you want us to do battle with something like that?" Herring asked, her sharp features gray from the beginnings of exhaustion.

Hanna winced. "Well not battle, hopefully? Ideally I'd like to do this with a small task force, since we… uh… have some previous experience. In that area. I did promise them twenty-four hours, but after that our best bet is probably to go in and take out the power center. Honestly, I'm not really much of a tactician. This is just something that's worked for us in the past."

"And if that's not possible?"

"Then…" Hanna sighed, "then we defend the city and play the rest of it by ear. Me and the guys can run whatever offensive turns out to be necessary but—"

He went on explaining, but it was easy to tune out.

The doctor's eyes strayed back to Conrad. Dumbass, shrieking, useless motherfucking goddamn Conrad. Conrad who learned how to use a gun in the space of days, who learned how to hunt in a matter of weeks, who took six months to finally sneak up on Worth, who had exchanged life-debts with him so many times he didn't even know who owed who these days, let alone why. Conrad, whom he'd watched sharpen and harden, like a stone beaten down into an arrowhead by the force of time.

Conrad who was still Conrad, always—just like Hanna was always Hanna.

Miriam was at the other end of the table. Worth didn't know what the hell she was doing in here, or who the hell had let her in, but his trigger finger was itching to put a round into her _classically gorgeous_ chest, into the pumping bloody thing that bruised so easily. She had no fucking clue what she'd tried to do—what she'd successfully done. Not a goddamn clue.

He'd like to show her, precisely.

Hanna was asking for volunteers of some kind, something front lines for a worst-case scenario, and Worth only realized he'd been half-listening when his mouth opened up and a reply came bursting out.

"I'll go," he said, voice working before his brain could catch up with it. Around the table, eyes whirled to rest on him. Hanna had stopped mid-disclaimer, his wide hands flat on the table.

"What?" he asked, a puzzled look in the faint lines of his face.

"Said I'll _go_," the doctor repeated, drumming fingers on the tabletop. "Y'need a man ter get it done? Who else y'gonna trust?"

The magician looked at him oddly. "Don't you… uh, wanna stay with Conrad? I mean, there'll be plenty of action on that front, and we don't have enough doctors to be throwing them up front in the lines of battle."

Worth looked again at Conrad, who broke contact first.

"Conrad's a big boy," Worth replied. "So 'e tells me. He can look after 'imself."

-A-

Jackson pulled up at the edge of town a couple hours before sunset, in his big white truck with its bed full of scowling green-jacketed men. The dust cloud came tumbling over the crown of the blockade before his voice even reached them.

Worth was one of the people on this side, carefully directing the ends of their rifles at the crew cut heads of half a dozen armed guards. Worth's in particular strayed toward the center of Jackson's skull, and he wondered how many of the women and men around him were aimed the same way. Why not just end it here? Fuck that supercilious prick and his crow-hop swagger, walking out in front of a wall of armed hostiles like the goddamn king of the world. Worth flicked off the safety.

One finger hovering over the trigger, Worth paused to consider a possibility.

The sound of a shotgun blast about five feet from his ear nearly made Worth fire his own gun anyhow, from sheer startled reflex. Looked like somebody else had the same idea after—

Blue smoke, like ink in a transparent casing, exploded up from underneath Jackson's feet and swallowed the spray of shot.

Worth felt his mouth forming vague swears, uninterested in what exactly they might be. Possibility fully considered.

Two more townspeople fired in quick succession, both gulped down harmlessly by the miasma. In between the curls of indigo, Jackson's narrow eyes glimmered out at them. It was at that point that Hanna arrived on the scene, split-soled sneakers slapping the dust as he raced toward the barricade and didn't stop, caught a foothold in a truck's open window and slung himself over the other side.

If Worth hadn't been pretty sure that it would get them both killed, he would have thrown down his gun and dragged Hanna back over the barricade himself. Kicking and screaming, with half a dozen soldiers laughing at them, probably. When was he going to figure out a way to keep that kid from throwing himself headfirst into potentially fatal situations? Ten years and he still couldn't manage it if he had a bona fide leash to work with.

Instead, he kept his gun on him as he scaled the hood of something more reasonably sized and raced after the idiot he occasionally referred to as his leader. Another pair of feet landed in the dirt seconds behind him, and if it turned out that their owner had a pulse of any kind then Worth would eat Fagula's favorite vest.

Hanna slowed down at the top of the hill, just a few feet away from where Jackson was grinning with his arms crossed loose over his chest. By the time Worth and one-guess-who-else-would-be-wearing-a-fedora caught up to him, it was like wading chest deep into the ocean as an electrical storm goes raging overhead.

It was a cold war, and it went on and on for a long time. No one had to ask what the verdict was. The way Jackson grinned down his nose at them said everything down to the signature at the bottom of the page. Hair-trigger ready, Worth's anxious fingers scrabbled over a lump of misshapen plastic lodged in the bottom of his coat pocket.

"Miguel," Hanna said, at last, a look almost like disappointment on his pale features. In Worth's sidelong glance, the younger man's eyes were icy blue and hard. "Twenty four hours is up."

Facing down a man with a scar across the side of his nose and a bullet belt cinched around his waist, Hanna looked like a soldier. In fact, he looked for all the world like a goddamn general. Worth watched the width of his shoulders and the steel length of his spine and wondered what had happened to that kid he'd met a decade before, broken and bleeding and ghost-eyed in an alleyway. What had he grown up into? What had he become?

"Give us back the kids," Hanna ordered, twirling a sharpie in one rough hand. "This is your only chance. I've been really generous with you guys, this far, but you know what? I am _so_ out of patience. The full force of the council is coming down on _your_ heads—don't say I didn't give you a chance. None of this has to happen. No one has to die."

Scarface laughed. "And you'll do what? Draw a mustache on me? You're wasting my time. You're just a two-bit street magician who got a lucky break, and if you're smart you'll skip town and leave the real magic to us. What we do here? That's the real shit. Your _council_ doesn't scare us, and those idiots behind you don't scare us either, kid."

Hanna glared at them for a moment, and uncapped his marker. "My name is Hanna Falk Cross," he announced, "and you can't say I didn't give you a chance."

Without a word, Worth snatched up the contents of his coat pocket and pitched the day's first bomb like a major leaguer splitting a hole through the air, and the man beside Scarface exploded into flames. Apparently that guy's mojo wasn't programmed for this eventuality. Tough luck, brother.

Maybe Hanna knew he would do it, maybe he didn't. All Worth really knew was that when he reached into his pocket for that first hell-bomb, a chunk of melted plastic with a nasty looking rune scratched into it, it seemed like the wind itself changed directions just long enough for Worth to lob it at the bastards who brought them all here to this godforsaken desert.

They fucking ran.

Doc Worth's boots scraped the casing of an old-fashioned shotgun shell half way down the hill, and the wobble in his step nearly sent him sprawling.

_This is what happens when you sell your soul to some four-eyed supernatural jackass,_ Worth decided. _Goes for me selling out to Hanna, and these douchebags to whatever the hell it was they sold out theirs to_.

The doctor ducked out of a new hail of bullets, feeling the shield charm around him cracking at the edges. The redheaded blur ahead of him ducked and wove, while the two of them behind turned every so often and took potshots from the hip as they ran, like they hadn't been able to in White Town. Scarface and his nasty looking crew would have set up shields of their own, but the arrogant son of a bitch hadn't thought to shield for chunks of two-bit magic, had he?

Worth was down to one bomb when they hit the bottom of the hill and the line of rusted cars that was about to become their fiberglass and steel trench. Worth could feel his shield rune buzzing on his skin as he threw himself over the wall, more than half used up already. He'd applied the damn thing himself, after all, and he'd never really gotten the hang of any of this magic shit.

Hanna had been too tired to spare the juice for it, though, and he'd rather just put up with his own shoddy workmanship than ask.

There was a lull while Jackson slipped into his truck and drove away, disappearing over the shallow crest of the hill and becoming a length of dust along the gray floor of the desert.

In the relative quiet, orders started going out. Bit by bit, the curved metal length of the barricade gathered life, like a grim coral reef blossoming in the dusk. Buckets full of bombs were settled into the ground every few feet, marked bullets were passed out by children with little red wagons, too young to understand what was coming but old enough to want a part of the action. Down the row, a woman in a white fur coat was tying runic tags to her collection of sporting-goods arrows with a single-minded determination.

The sun sunk lower, a faint yellow stain in the low hanging clouds.

Just before sunset, a shadow settled over the distance. Worth squinted through the empty space where a window had been smashed open, picking out a whirl of dust coming up from the tires of ten miniature trucks barreling over the unpaved scrub. He shouted for a runner, sent something in the vein of a terse warning to Hanna, and then settled into his position to wait.

Across the desert, the first puff of smoke erupted under a wheel.

Worth's lips skinned back from his teeth. It was too far away to hear, but he remembered the sound of a trashbomb exploding underfoot and that was good enough for now.

Too bad Jackson was war savvy. After that, they drove more carefully.

There was commotion behind the doctor as countless people rushed to get the children put away and the doors locked and the ammunition laid out and the soldiers into their foxholes, but Worth's eyes were on the dip of a hill one ridge away from their current position. Hills here weren't much around here. He could see the dying light reflected off the windshields almost all the way down, flashing just long enough for him to hiss in a breath before black smoke and a muffled blast rolled up from the divot.

Makeshift landmines. Worth's breath hissed back out. Good thing for all of them that he'd had practice.

Just one thing left to do. Here was what he'd signed up for, why he'd come up to the front line at all. In an uneven wave, a score of dumb motherfuckers climbed over the barrier—Worth himself for the second time that evening—and scrambled up the low slope between them and the enemy.

See, if the enemy has superior manpower, the first thing you've got to do is take that away from them.

Bodies were scrambling stumbling out of their vehicles, coughing smoke and frantically slapping clips into their guns, wild eyes whirling in search of enemy combatants. Panicked. Instinct-driven.

The doctor dropped to one knee, lined up his sights, and blew a hole in a pottery-packed explosive that had been half-buried in the downslope of the hill. Bright orange clay and dirt blasted down into the panicked frenzy of human bodies, swiveling their attention backwards, leaving countless unprotected backs exposed.

Shots fired. Men down.

Worth yanked the cap from his one napalm grenade and tossed it into the face of a man staggering up from the wreckage of his truck. He turned heel before he could see it make contact, but the howls slicing through the smoke behind him were reassurance enough.

Worth remembered his half-shot shield charm just in time to regret volunteering for the damn position, but the expected wave of fire never came. Instead, the ground shook behind them like the earth was ready to rip itself open, and a din of alarmed swearing and shouting followed them down the hill instead of ammunition.

Down and going so fast now that they half-tumbled more than ran, they hit the barricade and clambered over hoods and roofs, boots slipping on cracked glass, and threw themselves over the side into the waiting arms of strangers.

Said arms in the middle of helping him to the ground, Worth was already shouting at the red blur of Hanna sitting only feet away. "_Earthquake_?"

Hanna nodded, hands still pressed flat against the ground.

"Why ain't ya just doin' that all the time!"

In lieu of answer, Hanna vomited a cupful of blood onto the dirt.

Worth sighed. "Yer all fuckin' idiots."

The first of Jackson's army came pouring over the hilltop seconds later, and the same arms that had pulled each of them to safety began firing up into the mass.

Worth reached for his gun, and found an arm still pulled tight around his abdomen, luminous skin in the fading twilight. Whatever, he could still shoot whether they let go or not. He unholstered his pistol and aimed into the shouting mass just like the man behind him, who was currently holding up a third of his body weight.

"Ey Connie," he yelled, over the thunder of firing ammunition, "ain't you supposed to be watchin' the armory?"

"Fuck that!" Conrad yelled back, firing over the doctor's shoulder. "Every time you leave me somewhere _safe_, I just ended getting the shit kicked out of me!"

The army on the hilltop started retreating somewhat, backing out of prime aiming range as a few of their shields started to shatter under the barrage of bullets. Time to switch guns. The folds of Conrad's dusty white shirt shifted against Worth's slumped back, and the low moon blazed down through the breaking clouds behind them, and he took a deep breath of melted snow and fear-sweat and gunpowder.

"Y'kin let go now, Xena," Worth muttered, turning his head back to speak directly into the vampire's ear. Conrad's marble-smooth cheek brushed the stubble on his own.

His partner let go like he'd been slapped, pushed the doctor away, and snatched up a rifle to re-aim up the hill.

"I'm still severely _pissed off_ about last night," Conrad informed him, over the sound of a hell-bomb exploding. "And I'm still not forgiving you for what you said."

"Yeah? Then how come y'were waitin' fer me here?"

Standing in front of the vampire, Worth couldn't see what sort of expression Conrad had made—but he knew them all like he knew the positions of the bones in a man's hand or the sound of a beating heart, and he could imagine it easily without wasting the time it would take to turn around.

"It's not like I _care_ what happens to your sorry ass," the vampire said, as gunfire exploded down at them, lodging in the hood of the truck they were hiding behind. "I just don't want to be there when they tell Hanna how you got shot in the head while you were dicking around up here."

"Oi," Worth muttered. "Ain't that my line?"

-A-

Silver-blue, the writhing smoky coils around the distant figure of Jackson's truck bloomed into something eldritch and snapping as white fire exploded across the ground at his tires. Something similar, smaller, on the left flank was racing down the field in a motion half like a wildfire and half like a monstrous cat, and the length of cars shuddered and groaned under the impact of its insubstantial shoulder. When it leapt over the line, people scattered under its silver claws.

Countless hands dug into the marker-scribbled ammunition, fumbling for revolvers and rifles and frantically unlocking clips, while everyone in the line of fire tried to scramble out low to the ground, praying through clenched teeth for deliverance from friendly fire.

Thunder ripped through the circle forming around the djinn, shot after shot sinking with sickly blue sparks into the translucent hide. The smoky jaws slip open in a howl like a house going up in flames. Somebody shrieked—someone across from them had missed their mark.

The djinn hunched into itself, rolling enraged golden eyes, and then burst up into a column of fire, leaving nothing but the gray flickering ghosts of licking flames across the dirt.

Worth wiped freezing sweat from his face. That was the third time, and every time it lasted a little bit longer.

Piece by piece, the fiberglass bulwarks had started to break down. The hill ahead was scattered here and there with bodies turned gray in the moonlight, and far behind them Hanna's wounded soldiers were being loaded up and taken away from the open fire of the front line. Bullets were rationed, and Hanna's plastic bombs were running low, and for a battle with so much flash and bang and desperation, very few people were actually dead.

It was a thundering, frantic draw.

Doc Worth looked aside at Conrad's scowling, hard-eyed mug. In a cool, wordless way, he was grateful that the vampire was here. He'd gotten used to it, the banter and the heavy feeling of companionship and all the goddamn ticks and faces that Conrad made when he went to do anything from reload to curse his own shot. Grateful for knowing that he had someone's back to watch.

He'd gotten so bloody used to it he hadn't even considered an alternative, until last night.

And he was alive tonight, alive in a wild way with a desperate edge that came from knowing how close he stood to death and the memory of how old and hollow he had felt hours before.

In between reloads, Hanna dropped onto the ground beside Worth's feet like a demented Leprechaun. Conrad took a step back and nearly stepped on him, and swore a blue streak till his lungs ran out of air to make sound with. Then he looked down properly, and must have noticed the same thing Worth was noticing: the deep purple circles growing under Hanna's eyes, and the discolored smudges still lingering in the corners of his lips. Conrad swore again.

"Don't you go any bloody where," he snapped, shoving his rifle into the magician's discolored hands. "I'm going to go see if anybody in the second string has a water bottle. Worth, hold him for me."

Conrad stalked off, ducking awkwardly through the thin zone where enemy fire fell fast and hard, and disappeared into the ranks.

"He's gonna miss the show," Hanna noted, with the faint smile of somebody humoring a precocious teenager.

"What show?"

Hanna gestured towards the window of the car in front of them, through which the silhouettes of the staggered opposition could be seen. "We're about to do something really clever in just a second, and you're gonna wanna be here for it. We're gonna do a magic trick: tonight, we make all the bad guys' ammo disappear!"

"Disappear," the doctor repeated, skeptical.

"Well," Hanna admitted, "not like, _literally_. But yeah, effectively!"

A bullet zinged through the shattered window and embedded itself in the cushioning of the passenger seat directly in front of Worth. Motherfucking Jesus.

"Alright, how th' fuck we doin' this?" Worth grumbled, sparing a glare for Hanna.

Hanna grinned, wiggling his ruddy fingers, and Worth was immediately less than enthused. "Ma~gic!"

"Magic?"

"No, not magic. Ma~gic!"

"Specifics, Cross."

"You remember Gordon? Right? She is killer with the runes and stuff. Apparently she uhhhh played with some stuff when she was younger and didn't really understand and wasn't using the right accent or else wow we could have had some trouble out here but! It meant that I could skip a bunch of the rudimentary, all killer, no filler, am I right?"

Worth stared and waited. A few bullets dinged off of the car barricade and Worth hoped Jackson's crew didn't have much ammo stronger than .22 calibur. Cars plus magical barriers only got you so far. If ammo can take out a charging elephant, it can take out a rune shield in one shot and hit you through what little metal was in a car with the second.

"Er...So! Gordon, and that's a cool name, a girl who goes by Gordon, totally learned how to do some extra mojo jojo, and we are about to get our opening here in just a minute."

"Yeah?"

"Totally yes."

And like clockwork, shouts exploded from behind the enemy lines. "Diversion!" Hanna grinned. "Open fire when you see their backs!"

Suddenly Jackson's soldiers split into bunched groups, flipped around, and began firing at something behind their lines. Well, Worth could see their backs, so he fired too. A man went down. All along their line of cars shots fired off, most hitting true, taking out Jackson's men handfuls at a time. It was easy - too easy. But they were dumb. The only man who doesn't think to shield both his front and his back is a dead man, and fuck if they weren't finding a hell of a lot of dead men in Jackson's militia.

As the men fell and scattered, a few deserting and running, Worth could see what had them scared and didn't really blame them. On the curve of the hill behind them a pride of enormous mountain lions were lunging and snarling, froth falling from fangs. The soldiers were firing and, looking through his rifle's scope, Worth thought he could see the soldier's shots passing through the lions, mostly pounding harmlessly into the dust—a few, though, striking their fellow men.

"Christ."

"No, ma~gic!"

"How th' fuck she doin' that?"

"Illusion spells are pretty awesome, but really wear you out. She's basically lying down in a trance right now willing the illusion. As long as they don't realize what's going on, we might actually-"

Of course Hanna had to go and say it, had to ruin things. Jackson's car roared up from where he'd been sitting observing, and didn't stop moving until it had rolled headfirst through the lions. He exited the vehicle and Worth could hear him shouting, could see the crackle and minor sheen of a strong protective barrier, swirling glints like light on oil, through his scope. The men filed back into order, re-positioned themselves, hunkered back down.

He sighed. "Nice while it lasted."

"Yeah," Hanna said, palming the tired hollows under his eyes. "Party pooper just pooped in the punch bowl. I hoped we'd be able to take out more with that one."

The lions vanished, but at least Worth could feel a bit of a morale boost among their own people who were using the lull in action to reload their weapons. That was something. Conrad chose exactly that moment to come darting back to the front lines, clutching a batman mug in both hands like it was the dried out remains of a saint.

"What'd I miss?" he asked, blinking at the frenzied motion of men and women all down the length of the barricade.

Hanna wobbled.

"Oh shit," Conrad hissed, and reached for Hanna's left shoulder at the same time Worth was grabbing for his left. Between the two of them, they managed to keep the magician upright. Water sloshed over the rim of the mug.

"Drink," Worth grunted, trusting that Conrad would take his cue while the doctor was fumbling for a pulse. A little thin, but not a death warrant. On impulse, Worth reached up over where Conrad's hands were holding cup to lips and pulled down on an eyelid. No blue streaks. Thank god. It had been a while since Hanna had smoked anything, and they'd started to suspect the worst was over, but…

He still sighed in faint relief when the worst he could see were tired red veins.

"Hanna," he said, "stay with us fer a minute. Yer gonna pass out in a second. Anythin' the troops oughter know?"

The redhead mumbled something, coughed, and then tried again. "Keep safe," he managed. "Smarts. We got brain advantage. Be smart."

"We got _stupid_ is what we got," Worth retorted, and then lifted his head. "Stretcher!" he shouted, motioning to one of the clinic workers lurking on-call just out of the range of bullets. "Man down, needs a stretcher pronto!"

While they loaded up Hanna in the comparatively safe shadow of the bulwark, Worth ran a quick analysis of the scenario. Ammunition on both sides was about even now, mortality rate was within range of each other, but a line of cars wasn't going to stand strong forever and the next time that Djinn came back—

"We can't keep doing this forever," Conrad said, apparently running a parallel calculation of his own.

"Well it ain't like we got another choice," Worth retorted. "Sure ain't got the means fer another charge, an' I reckon the boys ain't got the energy for it either."

"We're not getting anywhere!" Conrad shouted, frustration and adrenaline thick in his voice. "At this rate, it's going to be the slowest _slaughter_ in the history of the fucking planet!"

"Whacha want me ter do about it?" the doctor shouted back, fingering the last clip he'd tucked away. "I got one bomb left, an' one bomb ain't gonna get us anythin' useful done!"

Conrad squinted up the hill. "Jackson. That's who's giving the orders? We can deal with humans—if we could just take out the djinn, the whole thing would crumble like a Greek ruin."

"Fuckin' art school faggot analogy," Worth grumbled. He left the clip in his pocket and pulled out his last bomb. "Look, Xena, this is _one bomb_. How ya expect me ter hit anythin' from way th' fuck over here?"

One of the enemy bombs exploded further down the line, something whipped up in the middle of the fight probably, and it exploded like a tiny old-fashioned mortar, blasting a hole in their right flank.

Conrad paused, finger on the trigger of his stolen rifle, and for a second it looked as if he was seeing through the world into something else, something more frightening and insane than anything the world had ever dished out for them in the last lifetime. Then Conrad looked back at him.

"You know how, last night you said I was a useless hunk of bloodless meat and I'd have done the world more good if I'd just stayed dead the night we met Adelaide?"

Worth squinted. "Yeah?"

"Well," Conrad said, slowly, "let's see you say that again, _doctor_."

And then Worth's hand was empty , and the last thing he could see of the vampire was a pair of once-expensive loafers disappearing off the hood of their truck and into the night.

Worth blinked, stared at his hands for about two seconds, and then threw himself headfirst after the utter fuckhead he'd long ago started calling his partner.

On the pockmarked hill ahead of him, Conrad was weaving across the danger zone, faster than any human could have dreamed, leaping over moaning bodies and ducking more of the tiny mortars that seemed to be multiplying across enemy lines, and Worth raced after him despite the burning in his lungs and the protests of his muscles because fuck if he'd ever paid attention to the condition of his body anyways.

Synapses fired…

He had no idea what he was doing. Scarface's idiot army was yelling, pointing, training all their guns on Conrad, but Conrad could see who was aiming at him, where to dodge, and Worth watched the ground just feet ahead of him explode with ammunition that had missed its target. They were close enough now to see individual faces, and Conrad seemed to have found the one he was looking for. There was just the simple matter of a few armed men cluttering up the path between them.

He could hear Conrad's voice, but not the words, and god only knew what he'd yelled before the darkness exploded into fire for the second time that night, flames rushing up the figure of a man and leaping out to the men around him—fire and shrieking and random shots, and Conrad must have thought his chances of making it back alive would be miniscule, or maybe he just wasn't thinking at all anymore, because rather than keep running, he tugged his old pistol from its holster and proceeded to fire all twelve shots into the crackling charm-shields of the surviving men in front of him, shattering at least one with a telltale pop and scream.

And then he spotted Jackson.

Worth would swear to god afterward that he'd never seen anything move as fast as Conrad did, in the next thump of a heart beat. A white blur of inhuman angles, he sliced through the blue coils and kept on going, claws flashing, and in the blaze of a bomb bursting nearby there was just enough light to make out the length of one talon as it hooked on the string around Jackson's neck.

Leather snapped.

All around them blue smoke paused in the moonlight, the bulging thunderhead of it high above them tilting delicately, like a predator sniffing the wind. White burning eyes flicked downward, curved up in the unmistakable slit of a smile.

"Oh," a low voice whispered, "_Miguelito_…"

Jackson, the poor son of a bitch, probably never knew what hit him. The inferno that shot up from his feet seemed to grin, if a pillar of fire can do that, and swallowed him whole.

By then—and it should have been impossible but tonight he was faster than he'd ever been in his life—Worth had caught up with Conrad and grabbed the younger man by his singed collar and screamed for him to go back, _go back!_

Something seated deep in the fight-or-flight, do-or-die recesses of Conrad's brain must have heard that without question, because it was only with Worth's hand fisted in his shirt that he finally turned and ran. And sparing a few shots, Worth turned too. They all but flew back down the hill, Worth firing over his shoulder just like he'd done earlier that night, watching half the army behind them whirling in confusion while the other half raced down after, enraged, mindless of the forces they knew waited for them behind the line of battered cars.

There was one thing going through Worth's head, and that was the memory of Hanna telling him years ago that a shot to the heart or a shot to the head will kill anything—anything that can be killed.

He stumbled, lost his balance, picked himself up on the power of sheer senseless determination and felt nothing. When they reached the first freezing pane of metal that marked safety, the doctor grabbed Conrad under the arms and threw him over, ignoring the blazing hot feeling that exploded over his left side, as vague as the afterimage of a lighting strike.

Safety.

He hit the ground on the other side like an old mattress tossed out of a truck, bone meeting the icy dirt where snow had melted and almost refrozen. All in the same second, like they'd been given sudden permission, the townspeople stretching out on either side of him reopened fire, and he could imagine easy enough fifty of Jackson's men staggering and stumbling halfway down the hill, riddled with bullets.

Hands were on his chest. Cold hands. He glared blearily at them, and his heart thudded in his chest like it was clawing its way out of his ribcage. His breath was raw and his mouth was full of freezing saliva.

"Oh god, Worth, you're shot. You're shot, shit, shit shit shit—"

Pain was something Worth understood, and he went searching for the white-hot center of it while the air around him filled with cracks of gunshot and shouts and Conrad.

"You weren't supposed to come after me!" Conrad shouted, grabbing Worth by the lapels, and the Doc finally noticed that his own jacket was opened to the night chill, and Conrad was sitting across his hips.

Irony, you sweet mean bitch.

"Wha'," the injured man managed, between heavy spittle-stained breaths, "y'really think I'd letcha commit suicide withou' backup?"

"Oh god," Conrad moaned, pressing cold fingers to the soaking red stain spreading over Worth's chest. Bullet went out the other side, then. Would have been a small mercy as well as a miracle, under other conditions. "Oh god this is terrible and I'm not even hungry anymore, oh god. Why would you _do_ that?"

"Meat shield," Worth replied, with a dull laugh. "Ain't I thoughtful?"

"You don't even want me here," the vampire said, horror slipping though each syllable. "You told me to leave, didn't you? You said we'd all be happier if I just married Miriam and left you all alone and stopped… stopped messing everything up. You said that! _Why did you say that!"_

"Hate how ya talk to her," Worth replied absently, considering how his fingers were feeling unusually cold. "Din' want ya t' leave us fer some cow-face broad."

Underneath the scattered cracks of gunfire, Conrad let out a noise that was equal parts frustration and fear.

"I wasn't _going to_, Jesus Christ Worth, of all the… never mind, okay, never mind, I need—_Doctor_! Somebody, I need a _doctor_ or bandages or—God!"

"Won't work," Worth murmured. "Not now. You'd need a trauma unit an' an ambulance, an' all we got is dirt 'n bullets."

"_Why?_" Conrad repeated, fingers digging into the thin flesh over Worth's ribs. "Why in _fuck's_ name did you run after me? This is so _stupid_. Why did you do that? I would have been fine. I would have been fine and now you've got a hole in your organs that I could thread a pipe-cleaner through!"

"Was scared," the doctor admitted, something he did for only the second time in his entire life. "Scared 'n stupid. Tha's all."

"Scared _why?"_

Worth looked up at Conrad's face, at the clouds and stars that were blurring together into a vague blue-white smear behind him, and grinned.

"Scared they were better shots than me 'r you."

"But you're human! You're alive! You stupid _dickwad_, at least I had a _chance_!"

"Yeah?" Worth contemplated the spreading stain. "Guess I didn't like those chances, eh?"

Conrad tore at the shirt, ripping it seam from cotton seam like so much paper, and stared down at the ugly black place below the doctor's heart.

"Why?" he asked, again, this time softer, and for a second he looked no older than the twenty-six he'd been when he first entered the world of desperate heroism, kicking and screaming all the way. "Why not?"

Worth blinked.

"Fuckin' love ya, y'dim twat," he said. "Maybe it's not th' best time but… Christ, yer slow."

The world swam.

"Love ya anyhow."

The last thing he heard was Conrad's voice, but he was too far gone to know what it had said.

Then there was pain, suffocating shrieking relentless _makeitstopmakeitstopgodwhy _god w h y

And then beautiful, empty numbness.

-A-

That should have been the end of it.

It wasn't, of course.

But by all rights it should have been.

-A-

He wasn't dead.

Well, he didn't think he was dead. He was pretty okay with the idea, but part of him had long suspected that a man who wasn't scared of death was a man death couldn't be bothered with. So when he noticed that his brain was processing a sensation—the actual sensation was irrelevant—he started to suspect that he wasn't dead at all.

Hm. Another sensation. His mouth was motherfucking _dry_.

He opened his eyes, with an exhausting amount of effort.

A flashbomb exploded ten feet from where he was lying.

"Worth, Worth, fucking—fucking _Luce_, Luce Worth, are you awake?"

His eyes flicked up, met another pair of irises, bright red like hard candy, a cherry colored star expanding from a black pupil. Oh. They were so red, and the skin was so white, white and purple where shrapnel had left bruises of thick brackish blood just beneath the surface, pinkish and rippled in still-healing burns.

"Connie," he rasped, and when the hell had all this dirt gotten in his mouth? "Connie. What the fuck?"

"Oh god," Conrad wheezed, eyes wide, and promptly collapsed across his torso, head thudding painfully onto Worth's sternum. A freezing cold spot grew just above the place where Conrad's stupid huge nose dug into him. "Are you okay?" the vampire asked into Worth's skin.

"Nng. You fuckin' tell me."

"I…"

A bullet whizzed past the gap between their truck and the nearest minivan, plowing up clods of frosty dirt where it hit the ground. Somehow, it seemed to straighten out Conrad's resolve.

The dead man pressed a cool white hand to Worth's chest, just over his heart.

His unbeating, silent heart.

"I hate to tell you this," the vampire said, swallowing faintly, "but you're dead, you sorry sob."

It occurred to Worth, for the first time in his life, that he'd forgotten to breathe minutes ago, and still hadn't gotten around to it.

"Ya didn'."

"Did," Conrad replied, shortly. "If you think you can pull that kind of passive aggressive last minute love confession bullshit on me and get away with it, you have another_ fucking _thing coming, asswipe_._"

Worth's eyebrows went up.

Well. He wasn't touching that topic with a thirty foot pole. "Fuck're ya burned fer?" he asked, instead.

Conrad wrinkled his nose, like he couldn't believe they were talking about this right now."I met Miguel's djinn while you were dead."

"Christ. You okay?"

"Me? Yes." The panes of Conrad's smeared glasses flashed. "Won't get the taste of ash out of my mouth for weeks, though."

Worth blinked.

"You…" Conrad started, pausing to lick his lips, "…you're gonna be thirsty. There's probably a few yards distance between the defensive line and Jackson's army now, and they've completely lost their shit, so. There won't be much to go around once the fight's over. You should go… take advantage of the chaos."

Worth looked up at his partner for just a second too long. This was the man he'd helped to shape, the man who shot like a Gatling gun and charged headfirst into the no man's land between two enraged armies, the man who left freezing cold patches of grief on Worth's chest and _still couldn't figure out how to say "bite somebody"._

Words welled up at the back of his tongue, god knew what he would have said if he'd let himself. Probably something redundant, now. Instead, he swallowed them down around the thickness in his throat.

"I guess this'll be interestin'," Worth observed, at last, pushing himself to his feet. Dizziness rattled his skull, and he felt like death had chewed him up and spit him into the garbage disposal, but he'd done harder on worse. "Th' whole… y'know. Immortality 'n shit."

"We'll make it work," Conrad said quietly, but there was a kind of iron in his voice that made Worth believe, despite his better sense, that somehow they would.

"Roit. Sure an' we will."

Worth turned to go, put a hand on the hood for balance, but Conrad caught him by the jacket just as he was about to step away. The younger man—dirty and pale and just as fucking stupid as ever—looked hard at him, like this was the most important thing he'd do all night.

"I love you too," he said, "and I'm not going anywhere. I never _was_."

Worth grinned, and after these last couple days it felt like his skin might just shatter under the force. Far away, someone shouted a retreat.

"Kin I go yet," he asked, "or are we still havin' an Oprah moment here?"

(END)


	4. Epilogue

_Facing the Bullets_

Epilogue

Remember to drop by the Master List to make sure you haven't missed any fics that maybe didn't get posted to FFnet. The link to it is on my page. Thank you for reading, you wonderful people, and I hope to see you again in future installments.

* * *

_Nearly Three Years After_

_Arizona_

Two days after the shootout at the Oh Shit Corral, they were still picking up shattered glass and scattered ammo from the east side of town. Worth had managed to weasel his way out of most of the cleanup duty roster, it being a largely diurnal task and him being—

Well. Lately more or the nocturnal persuasion.

But this evening the choice had been between pitching in for reconstruction efforts and joining the party wagon as it took a delegation into White Town, and nobody was buying any bullshit about his poor old back acting up. Lousy goddamn immortality, making a man responsible to the community.

Worth paused and ran his tongue over the tapered eye-teeth jutting out over his lip. He'd already sliced himself open enough times that counting them had just gotten embarrassing. There was a near permanent smear of brackish blood forever hanging around his mouth these last couple of days. It had an odd flavor, a sharp warning on the tongue like stomach acid. Not exactly an appetizer.

Oh look, a perfectly good shotgun shell. No fucking way he was turning that one in.

Someone with short nails tapped him on the shoulder as he was bent down over the dirt. Scowling, he pocketed the shell with a shove.

"Oi, whatcha—"

Miriam stood behind him, the fading sunburn on one cheek covered up by a massive wad of gauze. Worth made a fist around the ammunition in his pocket. She looked at him. He looked at her. The shotgun shell cracked open in his hand.

"…Hi," she said.

"…Evenin'," he replied, surreptitiously wiggling his powdery fingers.

"So, uh," she started. She paused, scratched vaguely at the arch of her nose, and tried again. "I heard you got, uh. That Conrad. Huh. …Nice fangs."

Worth just stared at her.

"I'm glad," she persevered, "you didn't die. For whatever that's worth. I know you guys are leaving in a couple days, and I just wouldn't want to leave all this bad blood—shit, sorry, um. Basically I want us to make peace, if you're up for it. See, now I get why you were being so difficult, and I want to put a couple things to rest."

Worth lifted one blond eyebrow. "Oh yeah?"

"Yeah," Miriam said. "A couple days ago, Conrad explained to me that you were hitting on me. At first I really had no idea what was going on with you but—"

Worth squinted. "Junior, hold on a—"

"No, look it's okay, Conrad is my friend and I think I should clear the waters for his sake," she insisted, powering right on through.

"Great, sure, I agree. Lemme explain—"

"Hold on," she said, "you can talk next. Doctor, it's not that you aren't attractive, I mean, in an older… Cowboy ish sort of way, I guess, but you're really not my type and you're probably too old for me anyways."

"Oi."

"And in top of that," she went on, "I'm not interested in a long distance relationship, god knows if you'd even come back through here again. And then there's Conrad—"

"_Jesus_."

"—Conrad is my friend, and considering how… At odds the two of you are, I couldn't possibly take sides like that—"

Doc Worth reached out and shoved a hand over the crazy broad's mouth, which apparently surprised her enough that she actually stopped talking for a second. She glared down at it, nose wrinkling. What, his hands were clean. Mostly.

"Kid," he said, "I think ya got the wrong idea. 'N fact, I reckon y'got every damn wrong idea ever wriggled its way outta god's ineffable asshole. I ain't never been in'erested in bangin' ya."

"Mmhhp?"

"Christ naw. Got enough on my plate without jugglin' polamory on top'a it. Lesson I picked up in Utah, don't go chasin' after yer second wife till ya got the first one settled down."

Miriam peeled his hand off her face with two uneasy fingers. "You've got a wife?"

"Yeah, she's a big gal pal'a yers. Ain't want ter spoil the surprise, but yer likely t'get maid of honor when we do the service. Sorry ya can't be our flower girl, but I reckon if we give anybody else the job it'll break poor Hanna's big sparkly heart."

Miriam ran her nails through her hair, apparently forgetting that it was pulled back into a ponytail and consequently knocking long tufts free of the elastic. "Are you seriously fucking with me after I came out here trying to offer an olive branch?"

Worth considered her for what felt like an awfully long moment. Unbidden, the memory of Hanna surfaced in the lowest tidal pools of his brain—their first night here, less than a week before, blue eyes wide and worried and focused on Conrad seething in the driver's seat. _He worries_, the dead guy had said.

And he'd been right to worry, hadn't he.

Worth sighed, more of a thick irritated huff than anything, stale air whooshing out of his lungs. He was a goddamn saint, he was. Ought to get a medal for how motherfucking reasonable and neighborly he was being here.

"Connie didn't happen to mention to ya how the two of us're some kinda item, did'e?"

Miriam blinked at him, her mouth opening slightly like she wasn't sure if she had words to say or not. "Item?"

"Yanno," Worth said, making random motions with his hands, "engaged ta be fuckin'."

"…Are you honestly _still_ messing with me?"

"Uuggh," Worth groaned, grabbing at fistfuls of dirty hair over his temples. "'M not lyin', ya suspicious goddamn cow. We got a thing, me 'n him. Whatever kinda stupid fuckin' arrangement don't get ya laid but gets ya well ter damn screamed at constant, we got that kinda thing."

"Sounds like a marriage," Miriam remarked, still skeptical.

"Heh. Swore up 'n down I wasn't never gonna get hitched, an' now look at me."

Miriam's hand tapped her side, fingers rolling across denim like a tiny wave. "So… you're his boyfriend?"

Worth pursed his lips. "D'I look like somebody's prom date ter you?"

"So you're _not _his boyfriend?"

"Shit, lady," he said, shrugging irritably, "how would I know? We never talked about it."

"Ahhh." She nodded to herself, like everything was suddenly a big rosy window of clarity. "I can't believe he didn't mention this."

"Yeah, I ain't too pleased about it either."

"Word to the wise, you might want to decide if you're his boyfriend or not. Uh. Pretty fast. You probably know that Conrad's got some issues with stability."

"Er."

"And why do you talk to him so rudely if you're interested in him?"

"I don'—"

"And why are you even interested in him?"

"Er?"

"Why is he even interested in _you?"_

"Oi!"

Miriam held up her hands. "Whatever, I'll just ask Conrad. I'm not sure you're even capable of carrying on a coherent conversation."

Worth scowled. "I thought ya were offerin' me some kinna olive branch here, not a bloody roast."

"Let's be honest here, I've had an easier time prying information out of a locked safe with a crowbar."

"I'm a goddamn open book, Junior."

"Yeah? Alright then, why don't you lay it out for me Mr. Great American Novel. Why do you love Conrad?"

"I object ter the phrasin'."

"Wow, that is so _opaque_."

"_Christ_," Worth swore. "I don't fuckin' know, I gotta have a thesis or summat? Ya want that in MLA or Chicago format, professor? Shit, why I gotta have a reason?"

Miriam gave him a sardonic look, eyebrows raised. "No," she said, like he was being difficult for the sake of being difficult and she wasn't amused. "Just be genuine for a second."

"Yer a right terror," Worth grumbled, and dropped down into the dust on his ass. He didn't say anything for a long time, but the junior interrogationist just kept standing there, with her arms crossed, waiting.

Now would be a great time to try out the bat thing, if only Worth had bothered to practice any in the last day or so. Being knocked out for twelve hours made it hard to find time to experiment, when the other twelve hours were spent patching up a battalion of armed civilians who don't know better than to plug up a wound with a wad of clothing. The amount of useless tourniquets he'd seen after the battle was enough to make a lesser man take a long walk off a short dock.

He looked up. Miriam was still waiting.

"He tell you how we left town when the plague was first kickin' up?"

"No," she answered, impatiently.

"I came an' got 'im," Worth explained, hands hung over knees. "Lost somebody in the first big shake 'n couldn't stand ter lose more. Hanna had hisself a babysitter, but who was gonna watch Connie? Thought ter myself, _this dipshit'll sit down in the middle of the road an' wait ter starve if nobody gets 'im by the leash_. So I got him. I'm thinkin' I'll just drag him off somewhere safe an' hand him over to Hanna, wash my hands like I always done, set up shop somewhere folks can pass through like they always done."

"…And?" Miriam prompted, after a moment.

Worth frowned. "Well I ain't settled down yet have I?"

"I'm not sure I follow."

"Jeeeeesus. I gotta spell it out fer ya?"

"That's kind of what the point of the conversation is supposed to be, yeah."

Worth sighed again. "Awright. So, we leave town like this—"

"Doctor could you at least _try_ to—"

"Hold on, 'm goin' somewhere with this. So, how we leave town is like this: me 'n Conrad, we find this Cadillac with the keys in the glovebox, and we steal it. Connie's this big squishy bag'a neurosis and watercolors, ain't hardly broke a law in his life, but we jack that Cadillac and we go right on out of town. Stop at a gas station. Some Neanderthal breaks out like he's gonna cap us both fer trackin' plague all over his nice clean carpet. I take a bad hit, I go down. Think ter myself, _shit_, _so much fer savin' anybody_. An' then… then that poncy faggot broke a bottle over the guy' head."

Miriam peered down at him, baffled expression mostly visible by lamplight and moonlight. "What's that got to do with anything?"

"What it _ain't_ gotta do with anythin'?"

"Are you seriously trying to tell me you love Conrad because he broke a bottle over somebody's head one time?"

"Fuckin' hell Junior, yer missing the point."

"Well here's a bright new concept for you: how about you just _tell me what the point is?"_

Worth's hands made strained, aborted attempts to strangle something. "I don't damn well know!"

Neither of them said anything for a while. Worth discovered why Conrad took such deep, unnecessary breaths whenever he got wildly pissed off—fresh oxygen pulsed in and out of his chest, and his mutated nervous system remembered briefly what it was like to be alive and well supplied.

They'd given Conrad such a hard time after he first turned. None of them had understood what that kind of transition felt like, not then. Now that Worth was feeling the same disorienting gamut of transitions—instincts muddled and recoding, sensory input fucked to hell and back—he couldn't shake the feeling that he'd set himself up for this one. Just the lack of a damn heartbeat...

Conrad told him the first week was the worst.

Finally, Worth looked up again. "Feelin's ain't my forte," he said at last, shrugging lopsidedly. "Got other things ter be dealin' with."

"Big adventures?" Miriam asked, only half skeptical. Maybe even a little jealous.

Worth snorted. "Hell, I'd take a chargin' troll over a therapy session any day, I would."

"Okay, well," Miriam started, shoving her hands into her pockets, "I appreciate the effort, then. I guess I'll just go tell Conrad you fell in love with him because brained some guy in a gas station."

The doctor squinted up at her. "Wha- Ya wouldn'."

"Hey, you think I'm keeping this stuff to myself? Dream on."

"Ya goddamn dirt sniffin' cow!"

But Miriam was already half way down the street before he could stumble up to his feet, swearing and grabbing at handfuls of loose dirt. She was lost around a corner before he could even try to dig into any of that vampire speed—god knew if he could even do that, this early on.

Stumped, he resorted to kicking a long-dead streetlight until he couldn't feel his foot anymore, and grit his teeth to the sound of laughter bounding out across the desert.

(He reckoned, though, that at the end of it, they'd turn out all right.)


End file.
